"the right to vote does not give you power; power gives you the right to vote"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAj5EnyuakI
uh well thanks for joining me no all thank you for having me let's talk about the four strands of the fabric of reality theory of epistemology evolution by natural selection quantum theory and computation um before we get into the specifics of each one what do these four theories broadly offer to the average person and what should they care about incorporating each one into their World Views so I'm going to be paring David deuts this is not my original contribution in any way but uh 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 causitive what 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 um 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 uh nature hath no boundaries as the famous saying goes and uh everything connects to everything it's a 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 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 um but they also connect to each other in very deep and interesting ways and so it's one of those World Views that has to be absorbed as a whole although even calling it a worldview is is doing it a disservice because A worldview is often just an opinion you know whether I'm a communist or a capitalist or a Democrat or a Republican these are worldviews but these are grounded in our best theories in physics mathematics computation Evolution biology uh Etc and so economics philosophy sociology politics whatever but so so to contradict uh a piece of what you're saying in 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 and say well then how do you explain that um so I I find his worldview is a framework and it's a framework that's rooted in fundamentals and Sciences uh 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 other things that that explains so you have to look at it as a web and it's it's hard to absorb absorb that it's hard to take that from another person uh especially when your ego steps in the way and says well how did this guy figure it all out so I think you have to remove the person from the theories you have to read um both of his books I would argue um 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 not a lot of things in this world that can make you smarter is that how you pitch Do's books to people unfamiliar with his work yeah I don't really even care about pitching but yes that that is how describe it I would say that uh 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 have been incredibly influential there was a time when I went through um Nasim taleb's work for example and I found it very useful um so it's not to say it's the only useful thing out there but I think his uh framework has the deepest explanations and the furthest reach so you will find yourself applying it all over the place 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 uh 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 mathem mathematical Parts I struggle although I gave it a good effort um and I learn something a little bit more every time but I I think the 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 uh 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 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 is H it's kind of a mistake too um I mean think of them separately but rather as a whole world viewer framework um so fism right it's the the opposite of dogmatism and relativism in a sense and that it says you can be you can be wrong there's something objective to be wrong about and um both cultural Rel both relativism and dogmatism reject that in the sunset dogmatism says you can't um you can't be wrong if you've read the script this what came from God and you necessarily can be wrong and with relativism it's like everyone is uh everyone has their own truth and again you can't be wrong so uh I guess what how have you applied epistemology to your personal or um professional lives 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 over complicate them and I understand why they exist they exist as a jargon for philosophers and 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 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 what's likely to be true how do you know what someone's telling you is the truth or not how do you know if uh some Theory you have is correct or not and how do so how do you know something is true and then fism 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 cons confuse that with relativism which 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 uh in 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 economy right so there are absolute truths there are moral truths like slavery is wrong or just the simple uh Golden Rule you know do one to others as you'd be done by or the silver rule that uh don't do things to uh others that you wouldn't want done to you right uh 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 never know the ultimate truth and we should always be open-minded AKA fallible or be a fist um again I don't like that word but just just you can you you 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 uh coincides with common sense you pointed out that uh groups often search for consensus and individual search of Truth um and that making something social dist the truth of it and nowadays in the social sciences you know political influence seem to motivate a lot of what's happening there and 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 uh nobody really says physical science or chemical science right it's just physics and chemistry and biology um so I'm curious how you think individuals can independently um pursue the search for Truth uh when there are such strong incentives to um just conform and be a sheep yeah um 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 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 uh 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 there's uh two that are very uh natural and one that we've invented in modern times the two that are natural are nature uh you know if I drop 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 uh that I will physical scientist I would naturally gravitate towards that truth haha no pun intended um but there's also a uh a truth of social approval which is if I want to 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 if 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 um there's actually a fourth um 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 um I think the natural truth seeking mechanisms will lead you to truth the social one will lead you to social approval but 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 um so that's what I call a 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 uh and then if it if it turns out to be true you would know that because you get feedback from the right places uh and if and if it turns out to be false you get punished but if you're getting your feedback from other people uh you're usually going to end up with a wrong answer so examples of this like there entire professions where all your feedback comes from other people um Pol politics is a prime example of that anything political um social sciences you know I'm deeply suspicious of anything that starts with the word social uh social sciences socialism social engineering social justice you name it because this is all about group think um so it's not a mechanism for truth is a mechanism for coordination or cooperation often it means we're going to beat the truth into you or you better get along with us in our truth or else right and uh de 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 uh we should try and organize society and coordinate Society in a way that maximizes the growth of knowledge which doesn't which the social approval aspect doesn't really fulfill I guess 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 uh 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 um you know just uh taking everything and running or tragedy of the commons whichever whichever uh model you want to use but uh the history of the human species is figuring how to cooperate while keeping the cheaters out from breaking the system otherwise the the parasites overwhelm the host and the system dies MH and a lot of people nowadays are concerned about us running out of resources and uh they propos the solution is degrowth um can you make the case for a greater population and that uh the idea that our resources are at any given point of time are only limited by our knowledge and U obviously the laws of physics well there's two different issues here one is uh you know 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 you know are we an invasive species that's taking out the Earth um 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 uh is the act of substituting away from one resource to another um as we ran out of uh burning wood uh we started burning coal we ran out of coal we we didn't actually didn't 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 um we uh have gotten we've gotten nuclear we've got solar we've got wind um the universe is full of unlimited resources the universe the Multiverse whichever version you take is staggeringly large Way Beyond your ability to CA toon our resources we haven't even wrapped a Dyson Sphere around the Sun and extracted all of that energy there is unlimited energy even in the so-called empty cubic meter of space there's plenty of energy um it's literally just a question of knowledge Dark Matter Dark Energy equals MC s nuclear fusion there's unlimited energy the only thing that's holding us back is knowledge the same way the same is true of any resource um you know are we running out of wood no we can grow wood um you know we can grow unlimited trees we can plant unlimited trees So eventually we'll we might find a future civilization may be able to synthesize trees may be able to synthesize long dead trees so it is always a question of knowledge so so that that is 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 and you know they're not fists to use your earlier phrase and they're not going to revise their worldview um based on M logic um but then the question is like are we destroying the Earth well that's a little more subtle uh the Earth is a little hostile to us to begin with like the the actual uh natural state of the Earth would would support a population of hunter gatherers that numbers in the millions not the billions so we're already well past that um and we might actually save the Earth in that long term we might stop the next heavy bombardment we might stop the next asteroid from hitting the Earth um humans through the creation of knowledge 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 and using up the Earth and destroying it and consuming it um is outstripping our ability to uh 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 uh kind of they're just looking at the things that are right in front of their face and not paying attention to the larger picture and they tend to be rather dogmatic or religious in their beliefs but I think the the reality is mixed like 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 um because they did not adapt humans can actually resurrect species we're bringing back the woolly mammoth anything we D DNA signature of we we can resurrect as uh yeah 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 um 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 um 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 um if climate change is an issue and it's hard to discuss because it's become so politicized um you know we 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 can't 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 um and to that I just say you first yeah uh Marxism right like you uh you started with oh we already have everything but some people have more than their fair share and so what we really need is just we redistribution and for everybody to um you know share and like 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 they they we 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 kind we have enough housing we just need to allocate it better and that is not how anything works uh deuts has a great definition of wealth which he says wealth is the set of uh 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 um and so when you think about it that way you realize that knowledge is not just stored of capital in the classic Marxist sense you know Capital versus labor but it's also knowledge on what to do with that Capital the cavemen or the Paleolithic ancestors had access to all the same resources we did they 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 um but yet they couldn't do anything they were not Wealthy by any stretch of the imagination and why it was because of knowledge so 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 on to a recent game where actually we can all eat and the big problem is obesity it's no longer starvation um and the big problem is boredom it's not actually work there's enough work um so in this environment switching your your evolved mindset from a uh 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 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 technology creates leverage and leverage creates the gap between the halves 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 you know in the the reality is the opportunities have never been more equal than than now uh 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 they're not Immortal and they're not going to be most likely not at this time scale so you have more youth than them um you have a lot of advantages over them so the wealth gaps are actually much smaller than people think uh and a lot of that is due to just mass production uh which comes from specialization labor and capitalism um but it's very easy to overlook that and agitate because that gets you high in the status hierarchy with other monkeys because it makes you look like you're you know fighting for Noble causes and um 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 AI is all the buzz in the world right now and uh people uh have this uh people are afraid that it might kill us all and so they proposed 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 first of all I don't think we know how to make AGI I think we what we have is natural language Computing um which is a tremendous breakthrough uh we can parse natural language data sets instead of us having to learn how to speak the computer 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 um creativity is is having a problem and solving it completely out of left field and jumping huge boundaries cutting through huge swats of search space to find the correct answer and to test it and all keep revising it um I don't think that necessarily the current uh batch of uh Computing algorithms will get us there although we're always one breakthrough away from the future um whether nuclear fusion or rocketry or immortality or or fighting viruses or or um or Computing um almost all the innovation of the last 50 years has come in the unregulated industry 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 um so it's not a coincidence that most of the innovation has happened in the world of bits versus Adams Peter teal lamented you know 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 and hurts somebody God forbid nuclear 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 nucle nuclear power uh 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 um just like uh you know exploding a fuel and a fuel air explosive is not the same thing as a gasoline engine um 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 um uh and software has been AI has been in crypto cryptography and cryptocurrencies uh what is the common thread between all of these things it's all software it's all in bits what is software is 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 regulating the free exercise of math 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 are 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 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 Improvement 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 time you can't solve this math problem this many times well all knowledge is connected to all of the knowledge 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 what about if there's 100 of us doing them INS 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 in oppressively you have to arrest people for doing mathematics which is insane um 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 full well into it so to me this is just innumerate people writing legislation yeah and anytime you add a regulation it can be in any sector you uh entrench an infinite amount of error because like this you cut off One path and you don't see that that path is sort it branches out as a tree and like those branches keep on growing and keep on growing and this infinite paths that the that um if that regulation weren't in place could have uh led to and that would possibly be maximal uh value creation because that's where uh all the people are willingly spending their money um so once you cut off that path you're basically you've stopped knowledge Creation in that space correct and and you know to give an example like let's take the most horrific example what was the most horrific invention of the last 100 years probably nuclear nuclear weaponry nuclear power well um 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 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 uh even the people who want degrowth right they aren't willing to start loss making businesses that's they don't want feedback from free markets because nobody would hire them um but they will get hired by academics which is feedback from people exactly why do you think there's such a growing interest um an academic growing interest in degrowth and maybe talk a bit about the the fall of Western universities well you can look outside the window it's perfect out here you know it's beautiful and it's the quality of life is incredible for a student and they have no real responsibilities and they get fooled in thinking that's how the entire world works but this is a controlled environment of low ENT and very high resources being pumped in from the outside from the state from their parents from uh all kinds of uh wealth creation that was done outside that is coming into the university and it's 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 um 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 come up with that 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 uh 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 um 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 attacks on the good ideas but uh any society that degrowth itself will simply get outc competed by the societies that don't degrowth 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 pregrowth society it's the same thing it's high infant mortality it's malnutrition it's lack of Access to Health Care uh and again it's the fundamental mistake of saying oh we're done we've figured everything out and we're gonna stop here and now we're just going to divide up the loot um 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 right but maybe have 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 I don't know why maybe it's built into the human species in evolutionary context but there there is a place for a person who says stop we're all going to die right and uh 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 don't insult the king we're all going to die uh don't go over there and don't eat that bat you know we're gonna 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 you know the were population collaps running out of resources climate change whatever there's there's a bunch of them every generation and I I think there's some small use to having those people around because yes we there are things we could do that could kill us all right 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 is becoming performative and the degrowth crowd is just a politically correct version of those yeah with degrowth I guess covid was a great example right if you were a proponent if you are a proponent degrowth you should be able to look back at Co and say see this is what we need this is what this is like we need covid for the next uh I don't know 30 years until like uh 2050 and then we can go to zero uh net carbon like will be zero don't give don't give them any ideas but but if if we were to actually reach um you know zero carbon emissions um I mean in a linear fashion maybe you know we can predict the growth of knowledge if we don't know if like we we actually have like much better technology tomorrow that uh you know captures all the carbon in 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 um I mean until the Paris Co is a good example because the question to a degrowth Advocate they're all for downsizing well it's never them first you know everybody else start downsizing they're all for like stopping production okay how much Healthcare are you will 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 O overly regulated so it's very hard to make Innovation 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 on where it's great what Healthcare would you like to give up you know none they always want the maximal health care everybody wants the maximal healthare nobody wants to be unhealthy but that argument applies at at infinum so I I just view these as like uh you know 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 you know pedal to the metal um and when you know 6 billion hum are voting this way and you're over here all all you're degrow are your own life's prospects I 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 not a good not a good Fork it's not too late pick a different direction would be my advice yeah I've been a Doomer too at various times in my life so you know just error correct made a mistake happens does that make you a bit more bullish on India and China and some of these developing countries rather than uh also like the developing and developed countries right it's it doesn't really it doesn't really work anymore yeah yeah and I mean there there 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 in the west and it's far more developed than Asia but so there are good ideas everywhere and there are bad ideas everywhere the the thing that I worry about is uh you know the West is a uniquely open free liberal liberated tolerant Society with still good rule of law it it's it's a very unique combination like I I love the American Bill of Rights for example you know freedom of speech right to bear arms right to not have surveillance and warrants and see you know all that stuff is slowly being nipped away because the nature of power to take those things away but the the incredible amount of intellectual physical and real Freedom that's available in the west it's not really there in the rest of the world those ideas are spreading but they're also being constrain 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 uh freedom is much more in the sense of Human Rights um human rights are taken much more seriously in the west and things like Reg getting the free exercise of mathematics is uh highly limiting human rights um so that's why I don't think it's a cultures are 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 um so yeah I don't I don't think they're the same and I don't think they're easily swappable I'm I'm just saying like you're not going to stop and China from doing what they're doing and India and China is just shorthand for basically the rest of the world um but at the same time I'm not saying that's I 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 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 um kind of rebell Reon against Authority and um against just worshiping knowledge instead of now criticizing knowledge and seeking better explanations 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 um next to each other so for example ancient Greece you had a lot of little city states um in the era of the Enlightenment you had a lot of little city States and and small municipalities in Europe and uh and there was also the Age of Exploration was going on so people were very free to like go to different places and what you generally find is like in those kinds of environments people can sort of Freedom shop you know 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 thinkers are now gathering over there so it kind of gives them an escape valve um from society not just from the government but also from cultural uh 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 um and or and uh 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 US uh for example still is but was much more Federalist where it depend 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 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 in New York um that's disappearing so but I think what's taking its place is the internet uh combined with a new Mobile Generation that's coming up that's you know much more Global so-called Sovereign individuals who um although that get hard to do with family and culture right it's it's all fun and well hopping airplanes and living out of airbnbs until you have a family we were just talking about Healthcare and uh you know you mentioned that no one wants um a less healthare no like less healthare than we have today everyone wants to be healthy but some people really get riled up when you talk about U extending lifespan as if we cannot exceed this uh a certain natural liit limit that a supernatural has missed out upon us so what do you think that is and do you try to convince people otherwise that that is evil it's mostly a religious belief when I 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 um first notice nobody is uh opposed to extending Health span right so nobody's 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 uh nobody wants to die right now while they're healthy so de facto you know if a then b b then C you believe in immortality you want it to so really it just boils down to a religious belief of it's unnatural and 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 re them through all of that well we got millions of times richer we already you know doubled our lifespan uh the world didn't end things got generally 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 um or it's a religious belief that we're being extremely unnatural and it's always a a hert issue it's it's 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 and the way that uh 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 iCal there too um but the way it's going to come is through rej Rejuvenation therapies uh 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 look at 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 those things so everyone's going to go for that so everyone's going to improve their health space 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 gone yeah often make the same kind of similar logical argument uh I say like if you are in perfectly good health and uh I ask you the question do you want to die tomorrow uh what would you say it's like right and when do you think that answer will be yes if you're perfectly good you're never going to say oh yeah I want to die tomorrow and you can always off yourself so so it's never about the self it's always about this uh fretting and uh you know an anxiety about what happens to the world what happens to the 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 um read Deutsch's theories and you you authenticate them for yourself is you realize humans are Universal explain ERS what does that mean that means that everything that we know in the universe follows the laws of physics and there's no reason to believe otherwise if 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 touring 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 that 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 quazars we simulate um 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 it might have more compute might have more memory but there's no con that it can understand that we can 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 fery or Elon Musk or uh you know Jeff Bezos or uh Yona sock 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 um you have a great tweet where you you say the modern secular religion casts man as the devil and the state as the Savior um this religion comes in various shapes and forms But ultimately they all lead back to Marxism what do you think that is I don't know I don't know if it's Marxism per se I I I think there's a there's a struggle that's been going on in the human species from the very beginning uh there are many struggles but this is one of the more interesting ones which is between collectivism and the individual right if we're all individuals if we're all like closer to lions and tigers for example or even more solitary animals um then yeah you have maximum freedom but you have no survivability for the species uh in fact humans uh Homo sapiens I think you all know of Hari uh talked about this in his book um humans are Cooperators and we're Cooperators across genetic boundaries so you can have uh you can't have more neanderthals meet in the battlefield than are related to their by genes so you know you can get to your uncles and cousins and go to war and beat up the monkeys but on the flip side uh Homo sapiens you can have a 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 story 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 the pigeon on the wolf's back but these are just like you know silly little anecdotes uh 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 uh Al the markets are good for organizing that and and this is something that uh you know High R&D institutions do well like you know Elon Musk and crew building Dragon for SpaceX or whatever so in general you have the cooperator theory of the world or the collectivist theory of the world they kind of go together and then there's the individual free uh free uh Freedom theory of the world or the great man theory of History you know where you have uh and I didn't make that up they call it great man you can rename it if you want but uh you know it's like Einstein and uh you know Fineman 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 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 un Unity we're all going to be one thing we're going to go from being unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms to being a civilizational multicellular organism that marches um you know together and in its Best Vision it's like you know 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 is 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 uh individual society that would be Mad Max okay uh but I don't think anybody wants to live in a collectivist society either that's the borgs that's the struggle you have um and with uh the new religion you know the religion is about uniting the masses religion is about bringing people together with some higher Vision uh and it used to be about God uh you know there's a and there different versions but let's go with the Western version for a moment um there's there's there's usually a white male in the sky surprise uh 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 uh 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 n famously declared God is dead and why did you say that because once you took Newton and the enlightenment scientist seriously you realize well maybe there is 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 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 let 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 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 uh 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 thou you know you shall not make any official state religion and 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 express it but the state should not mandate it well now we do have a state Mandate of 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 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 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 like a paradise it was like a natural Paradise um Garden of Eden right everything is perfect until man comes along and 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 you have the devil which is mankind um you have the you have the perfect heaven which is the Utopia that you want to create you have the 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 call liberal it has to be a shadow religion it can't actually let itself be named because if it is named as a religion then it's actually forbidden by the Constitution 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 um and the whole thing is a fungus now obviously traditionally religions uh put man at the center of things and then science came along and said oh actually you were just descended from the Apes and uh you're not even at the center of the universe uh nor the center of the solar system right this this whole big universe that uh most of which like is so far away we might never be able to explore and um so you're just like chemical scum as Stephen this is one of Deutsch's greatest reputations and insights which is he shows how humans by being Universal explainers we're not just like smarter monkeys um monkeys are not capable of encoding much knowledge outside of what's in their genes humans are 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 that classic figure of like the you know the Walk The Crawling to the the sorry the the Tad poles to the fish to the you know to the toad to the walking monkey to the taller and taller monkey to the grer of the human that is completely false if you've seen that you need to un-brainwash yourself that is not true humans are Universal explainers uh you know we can create Rockets there's no amount of evolution that is going to get a monkey to create a rocket that going to sorry there's no short of it becoming a universal explainer like us um no 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 the telescope in the night sky and uh you would find that they would H 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 uh 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 and the 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 world is terraformed it's changed so uh 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 uh just recently um I think David was telling this today actually where he said that uh he read that the the uh mass of things produced by humans for the first time has like P passed the mass of things created by other things in the biosphere I don't know exactly what he meant by that but it just it's just like if 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 in the geological crust or the weather patterns or the uh the structure of the 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 multiplanetary species that will be more obvious but you can no longer explain the universe without explaining humans because we are 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 um 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 Bas 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 how have you applied Papa and deuts as a pomology or any other vast implications in your own life the epistemology is really helpful because it helps you figure out what's true and what's not so uh 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 nonsense um simple example is Guns Germs and Steel you know where he has a really Jared Diamond has a beautiful explanation of um you know why certain cultures evolved and others didn't he's like well Europe is horizontal and the Americans and Africa are vertical and when you're vertical then the latitude changes change temperature so Technologies like food production and domestication of animals don't transfer and so you're just your technolog 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 that trap uh so you realize that the dominant thing that's important is knowledge creation and then error correction to get better and better knowledge creation uh and Geographic and resource factors don't apply that much yes resources matter but um there are areas of the world that are better resourc than the areas of the world that where we first developed technologies that now the entire world relies upon so creativity is so much more the dominating force you to pay attention that that's that's an easy example it helps you get over the we're running out of resources argument 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 anti-natalist anti-human anti-p people arguments um so I I think in that sense the epistemology useful at at a base level you're always trying to figure out what's true and so uh poer had the concept of falsifiability which is very important like if I make make a statement that can't be disproven it's kind of a meaningless statement for 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 um or the Free Will argument is another nonsense argument so it helps you not waste time on those because they're non-falsifiable secondly uh Deutsch added the additional criteria uh 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 uh you can't just move the goal post afterwards so for example uh the example he gives in one of his books is you know why do we have seasons so there's the old Greek the mythology Theory well it's because pan 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 it's because panie you know got lost in her way out or uh why panie 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 um 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 um 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 vary and then to that I would also add uh you know there are parts of his books where we can read and he he adds a few more uh not Criterion but these are telltale signs and so I would say uh good theories also often make risky and narrow predictions so now when someone make makes a good theory say it says they good explanation they have a new Theory it's like okay well let's test it what what prediction are you making that other people were not making that is a high-risk prediction that if it turns 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 the mistake and that is a good Criterion for choosing between alternative explanations um 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 um you know so humans are very inductive creatures 1 2 3 4 5 then come 6 7 8 but a lot of the interesting things in life are explaining the scene in terms of the Unseen which means that very often things will happen that are nonlinear that suddenly there's emerging Properties or there's a nonlinearity or kink in the curve which something unexpected happens how do that happen you're boiling water it goes 98 Degrees 99 degrees getting hotter and hotter and hotter 100° oh it's really hot and then stays at 100 what's going on well turning into steam but the water's not getting any hotter than 100 the steam is hotter than the water you're going to burn yourself on 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 um 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 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 emerging 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 uh you know capitalism and reasoning and documentary film making 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 um so you know an unpopular one is people these days you know they'll say I'm depressed I'm unhappy why cuz I 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 underline cause is probably there are things that are making you depressed there are thoughts that are making you depressed maybe there external factors of how you want things to be different that are making you depressed but mere chemical imbalance um it can be useful for trying to fix it um 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 and happy and talk through it and think through it and then reevaluate your decisions and choices and it might help you so I I think uh you know operating at the right level of explanation he's got tons of this by the way tons and tons of it but uh there's lots of ways in which it can improve your thinking um you know all life is error correction um all judgment is error correction um uh you know just the core principle of like you want explanations you won't be satisfied with mere prediction um mere prediction is not enough because the world is a predictor uh you know you can just if you want to see what's going to happen next just wait the world will show you um uh but you also want to deeply understand why uh and at an expl 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 solve this one and that's why there's an infinite number of problems to be solve and you're always at the beginning of infinity I think poer and deuts both reject the uh anything called the scientific method which gets P into universities nowadays it's like uh you 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 um form any observations in the first place and some of these theories come so far out a left field um in physics it's more obvious relatively relativity and quantum mechanics um are exact examples that come out of left field uh where it it's not like uh Einstein just dropped more apples in Newton and then eventually got to relativity know he just did these crazy thought experiments that looked like they had no bearing on anything no scientist was even talking about them in inductive sense like go from A to B to C to D um and then ended up with um with relativity um but you know even in simple like everyday life it's like should I eat chicken or should I eat beef right well a a 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 um or I'm going to just throw it all together so creativity is unbounded and unlimited so just uh extrapolating inductively will not get you to the best answers and the best explanations and computers are very good at induction um and a scientific method the moment you have a method you program it you can write a program for well if you if you can write a program for creativity that's called AGI let me know when you have it um but until then uh just programming a method in that just in just repeats experiments and uses induction to go a little bit further um will not get you the best explanations induction has its place uh 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 uh induction is very useful induction works really well in what Nim TB calls mediocre stand the space that we operate in most of our everyday lives but it's not uh 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 uh the Nim TB example that he likes to give is that uh you know the turkey is being fed by the farmer and every day it gets like a nice meal it's like wow this farmer loves me it's such a benevolent farmer and Thanksgiving show next gets cut off cuz it had a bad explanation of what was going on it was purely inductive what do you think about the lwh hanging fruit Theory uh of knowledge and um I guess like does that explain the uh slow progress that you seen the slow down of progress that you've seen in physics and other scientific Fields I don't I don't think that's a good explanation I think the uh first of all if we're going to run out low hang fruit we would have run out a long time ago um so I 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 um I think it's it's much more around um you know I think science and Academia right now suffers from a lot of group think um new ideas are aggressively rejected um we don't have as many natural philosophers anymore kind of just off doing their own thing and just trying to um figure out better explanations there's a lot of Reliance on oh we need a super collider or a bigger telescope um there's a lot of group think like 30 people's names on a paper um entire areas of scientific research are sort of kind of closed off or forbidden especially in the biological sciences and genetics um partially for political reasons partially just because uh you know no bureaucrat will let you do anything that might ever harm a single person because it reflects poorly on them um and I actually think we are making a lot of progress it's just not uh it may not be it may not seem as fundamental like for a simple example the theory of quantum computation that deuts came up with or the Multiverse Theory uh or Constructor theory that he's working on I'm sure there other scientists who working on lots of other interesting things quantum gravity time Etc um they may just not have had the uh immediate visible output but all it takes is one person figures out the theory of dark energy and if we can harness that wow or if we actually get coal Fusion working that would be huge um so I I do think more theoretical breakthroughs are already happening you're seeing a lot of math conjectures solv 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 um the pace of technological progress has been tremendous uh and you could also argue that that technological progress itself is you know Theory 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 um nothing wrong with that the theory has to catch up um so I I don't think it's a low I don't think lwh hanging fruit is a good explanation I think it's it it may be a combination of we have it and we're still applying it we have it in technology uh we're looking in the wrong places with the wrong in kind of the wrong group thinky way is um we're relying too much on uh very large and very expensive equipment um we have this grant system where I think the average person who gets a grant in University now is 48 um whereas most of the scientific breakthroughs tended to come through people in their 20s or teen late teens um so maybe the wrong people are getting the money and the encouragement it's hard to say final question what do you think are the biggest threats to Western civilization right now let's get as specific as we can 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 Li 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 the the society is always structured around the ability to do violence like it or not because the people with the guns fundament mentally eventually need to get paid or they take over so I I you know even though I myself am not uh you know I think they're terrible things that happen with guns and a lot of crimes and school shooting soone 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 um and I think that trend is just getting worse so I think that is a difficult thing um religion is still around it's just masquerading is secular so you know that that invisibility gives it kind of a mind virus characteristic um other threats I mean there is there is truth to the fact that some kinds of knowledge are almost Forbidden Knowledge um 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 good has a bad kind of side to it in technology but what hap what the the tough part happens when the people who discover it are not the people who are wielding it and not the people who hold on to 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 racist from talking and will'll stop all the evil people from having guns who's going to do that because those people will be the evil ones I guarante you the lesson of History over and over and over is the people who are in charge with 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 Thug on top uh pole pot running Cambodia ma dong killing everybody in China Stalin running Soviet Russia uh 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 someone you know coincidentally it ends up being the friends of the people with guns aka the Communist Party um or the ruling family so these are just monarchies by another name they're just more popular instead of appealing to uh God and saying I'm ruling because I have the div divine right of kings and God is telling me to rule instead these uh 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 the these are just uh the modern versions of the old uh Divine monarchies um we' we've evolved things have gotten better but there's still more ways to go um so if I had to say I would say the greatest greatest threats um 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 away from you uh you know 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 100 of us on a on a desert island uh and we're trapped and we all kind 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 they have all the guns those 10 have it the other 90 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 um and there's very few institutions and organizations that do that um really it's the right to bear arms cryptography Free Speech mathematics personal Computing um these are examples of decentralized Technologies and capabilities that spread power amongst people most things concentrate power mic drop that was awesome thank you so much appreciate the
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