Episode 55: Why are Empirical Theories Special? (IQ part 3)

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:09]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. Hey, everybody.

[00:00:12]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, guys.

[00:00:13]  Unidentified speaker: Hello.

[00:00:14]  Bruce: We are going to do part three of Universality and IQ. This is actually the third part of the discussion. And what we did is we first talked about, in the first episode, we kind of talked about Dwarkesh Patel's theory about IQ and the problems it raised for the concept of universality. We then kind of did a steelmanned version of both Dwarkesh's theory and Brett's theory, which would be, we think, more or less Deutsch's theory. Brett has said more on the record than Deutsch, so it was easier to grab out Brett's version of the theory. And we also talked about some potential problems with it. In part two, we went over criticisms of Dwarkesh's theory. So to summarize my position, Patel is trying to take the normal theory of IQ, which is in and of itself a troubled, controversial theory. But as we're going to see, it is a legitimate scientific empirical theory.

[00:01:17]  Bruce: And we're going to define what that means and why it does qualify. And he's trying to explain it better. He can see that it doesn't explain much, which is one of the main things that the defenders of Brett's theory brought up against it, was that IQ theory explains very little. They claim to explain nothing. We're going to see that's not true. It does explain some things, but it doesn't explain much. They're right about that. So Patel tried to defend IQ by adding to it something that we're calling the hardware hypothesis and the scaling hypothesis. So the hardware hypothesis is that hardware is what actually makes the difference between higher and lower IQs. And the scaling hypothesis was the idea that there's sudden leaps in intelligence as the size of the network grows, for reasons that Patel never explains. My point of view was that particularly the hardware hypothesis and the scaling hypothesis really don't qualify as explanations at all. They simply describe what we see, that we've got this bell curve of IQ.

[00:02:18]  Bruce: It doesn't explain why there is, other than this kind of vague notion that somehow hardware makes a difference, and we don't know how. And then even the scaling hypothesis, it's really meant to try to show that why animals aren't on the human bell curve. And it basically boils down to that every so often for reasons unexplained, there's a giant leap, humans cross that leap, but currently no human makes the next leap. AI may do that. No explanation given as to why. This is like not a good set of explanations. And so Patel's additions to IQ theory don't really add anything as of today.

[00:02:56]  Peter: So you see it more as interesting observations rather than explanations. Is that fair?

[00:03:05]  Bruce: I'm actually going a bit stronger. I think Patel's theory brings nothing to the table as of today. I think his theory could be thought of as IQ plus the high scaling hypothesis and the hardware hypothesis. It's the hardware hypothesis, the scaling hypothesis that I think bring nothing to the table. The standard IQ theory that he's bringing to the table, that's a legitimate theory and he's right about that. It's an actual empirical theory that's been backed by tons of studies. So that part of his theory that he's building on top of the standard normal IQ theory, that part's just fine. It's the things he's trying to add on top of it that I'm saying, these aren't really explanations. They don't explain anything. They make no empirical predictions at all. They don't really bring anything to the table in terms of testability. They're really more ways to try to add the appearance of explanation to IQ theory, which is admittedly low on explanation, if that makes any sense.

[00:04:11]  Bruce: It depends on what you mean. If you're talking about Patel's theory as IQ theory, no, that's actually just fine. We're going to see that's a completely valid theory that's worthy of respect. But if we're talking about scaling hypothesis and hardware hypothesis, those don't really bring anything to the table as of today. Now, they could in the future. This is something that people often forget. If you've got a theory that's not a good explanation, or it just has no predictions and has no empirical content, it won't stay that way forever necessarily. The hardware hypothesis could maybe be developed into a completely legitimate explanatory hypothesis someday. Maybe the scaling hypothesis could be too. I don't know. But they are today. [“Are” or “aren’t” is unclear.] We can only really assess what we know today, if that makes any sense. So today we're going to criticize Brett's theory. We're going to talk through what it is that Brett and the defenders of his theory are getting wrong, and how they are to some degree misunderstanding Popper's epistemology to come to conclusions that Popper's epistemology do not allow you to come to. So let's talk about his theory again.

[00:05:15]  Bruce: He says, this is quoting Brett, forget degrees of intelligence, people all share a capacity to learn and to the same extent. It's what we choose to focus on learning that separates us. I quoted all this in the first episode, so I'm going to repeat some of it here. It's there in the choosing what to learn that value judgments begin being made. Those who choose to focus on learning mathematics, physics, science, coding, medicine, law, language, et cetera, are ranked higher. Those who choose to focus on learning sports, dancing, influencing, trades, crafts, art, pop music and soap opera storylines, office gossip, and politics, et cetera, are ranked lower. Said to be incapable of learning what they choose not to, emphasis his, unlike the previous group, we then judge them to be of lower IQ, is what he's saying. He says IQ tests select kinds of knowledge. This is why it's predictive.

[00:06:07]  Bruce: Some kinds of knowledge are more useful for getting higher paid jobs, going to particular careers and knowing what society values, but none of them mean differences in capacity to learn. All knowledge can in principle be learned by any person because all people are defined by a universal capacity to learn, and that means learn anything. But no one will choose to learn anything or everything. They will focus on their very personal, quirky interests. Of course, defenders of IQ will define intelligence as performance on IQ tests. Or to some other test, by fiat, like all such claims, entirely circular and non-explanatory.

[00:06:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:06:47]  Peter: It seems to me there's so much truth to the idea that interest is interwoven with ability that, I almost want to believe that.

[00:06:58]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:06:59]  Peter: Yeah, everything you just said. I mean, it's a really good point. I just can't quite buy into it totally.

[00:07:06]  Bruce: Well, I think what we're going to see is that it is a good point. Just as Patel's theory deserves credit, even though some of it is non-explanatory, that doesn't mean that what he's saying is pointless. Patel did a great job pointing out problems with Brett's theory. And that's not nothing, right? I mean, he's really kind of pointing out that IQ theory explains something that Brett's theory doesn't. And he's right. Theories have verisimilitude. They can be at once wrong and largely right. Quantum mechanics is wrong and also largely right. There's nothing contradictory about that. If we can think of theories in that way, and we can take the problems of both theories seriously, we can come up with something that does a better job than either of the current theories, and is more true than either of the current theories. It makes perfect sense that both theories are wrong in some measure.

[00:08:06]  Bruce: What is it though? Well, we don't know, but let's talk about it. How would you test the Deutschian view? Well, I suggested to them it was quite testable. I said, look, if IQ just measured interest in certain kinds of knowledge instead of other kinds, just test the children before they show interest in mathematics or physics or science or whatever. There's no way to make a value judgment at that point. If you find that IQ is stable even before they've started picking up interests in certain kinds of knowledge, we've refuted Brett's theory or at least an aspect of Brett's theory. Refuted Brett's theory in its current form, let's say. Now, I brought that up and I brought all these up with that. If IQ is stable before and after, which by the way, we've done these tests. It is.

[00:08:50]  Peter: Yeah, kind of. That's my understanding too.

[00:08:53]  Bruce: Right. This should be a refutation of Brett's theory. Now, in fact, let's do this. Brett's claiming that the difference is that certain kinds of knowledge aren't as valued. Well, if that's true, that makes a prediction. That means that we should find that all actors have low IQs, and we definitely shouldn't find that the best actors have high IQs. The most famous actors have high IQs. What we'd actually find is that it's really pretty normal for famous actors to have high IQs. In other words, even in these areas of knowledge that Brett is claiming is lower valued by society and that's why we assign lower IQs to people interested in those things, what we find is that people with high IQs dominate those fields too. This is even true of sports. Sports, depending on your position admittedly, but it requires quite a heavy, heavy cognitive load. Michael Jordan benefits from having a high IQ.

[00:09:58]  Bruce: And it's not really that abnormal for high IQ people to dominate in sports, particularly for areas like quarterbacks or basketball, where you have to make lots of quick decisions. But again, this should be a refutation of Brett's theory. Keep in mind that when I say refutation, what I really mean is a problem for his theory. It refutes the combination of the theory plus the background knowledge. You don't get to know upfront which part it's refuting. It's a problem that Brett's theory needs to now address. We've established that there is a problem with Brett's theory through observation. I also mentioned you could measure neutral factors. You could measure fluid reasoning, knowledge acquisition, quantitative reasoning, visual spatial processing, and working memory. These have nothing to do with what types of knowledge we value and which types of knowledge we don't value. Let's say we found that they all correlated. If we did, that would be a problem for Brett's theory because now his theory can't explain that correlation.

[00:10:57]  Bruce: On the other hand, if we did find that correlation, that would be consistent with IQ theory. It would be a case where IQ theory could have been refuted, but now isn't. In fact, as we mentioned in one of the past podcasts, that's what actually happened. Those factors I just gave, I didn't make them up, they're what's known as G-factor. There's tons of experiments around this. There is this correlation between these neutral factors that exists. The reason why we know that is because early on in IQ's history as a theory, there was all these different IQ tests that existed. They're all trying to test how much knowledge acquisition had been acquired and the whole point of IQ is that you're trying to measure a mental age versus a physical age. If you're a 10-year-old but you have the knowledge of an average 12-year-old, then you're going to divide that out and it works out to be 120 IQ or whatever it is.

[00:11:47]  Bruce: I don't know the exact formulas, but that's what IQ is supposed to be. It's about trying to measure how much knowledge you've gained. That's a tough problem and does IQ test really measure it? Well, we didn't really know. We still don't really know. There's all these different IQ tests that exist. They're measuring different things. People said, well, maybe it just makes sense that there isn't a single IQ, that people could have different kinds of intelligence. It's almost common sense that some people are good at math, and some people are good at English, and some people are good at art. Maybe there's multiple intelligences and IQ is a bad theory. They went out and they tried to measure that. What they found was, is that no matter which test you gave people, there was this heavy correlation between people scoring high on one test, and scoring high on another test.

[00:12:34]  Bruce: It turned out it didn't matter how you were trying to measure IQ that much, that it was measurable no matter which test you gave. That's what led to this whole idea of G-factor. If they had not found G-factor, if they had found that there was no correlation between these tests, IQ as a theory would have been refuted and it would be dead as a theory today. This is what we call a corroboration. This is an empirical test that could have refuted IQ theory and would have killed it as a theory, that it survived and that's why IQ theory, even though it's in a controversial state even today as the theory, it survives today because it has survived numerous attempts to refute it like that. It's really hard to see that this is an example of where we have an actual critical test between Brett's theory and IQ theory and IQ theory has survived it and Brett's theory didn't.

[00:13:30]  Bruce: Based on this then, how did the fans of Brett's theory, how did they defend their theory? Now, I gave their arguments in the first episode, but I didn't really explain what was wrong with their arguments. That's what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about what's wrong with their arguments. For example, also I gave counter examples. I gave the example of my Down syndrome neighbor who is so mentally challenged that he can't take care of himself even though he's in his thirties. He never will be able to. I said, how would you fit that into Brett's theory? Then I threw in their other things. Like I said, okay, what about taking drugs? If I take drugs, I mean, I had to do this. I had kidney stones while I was in college, so I had to choose between being on pain while taking my finals, or being on drugs while taking my finals. It was a weird experience because it was hard to know which of those to do, because both of those reduced my intelligence, my cognitive capacity.

[00:14:26]  Bruce: Pain reduces your cognitive capacity, you're not as good a thinker when you're in pain, and drugs reduce your cognitive capacity. Now, if the only thing that matters to cognitive capacity is what Brett says it is, which is the ability to universally explain things, then why do drugs reduce our cognitive capacity?

[00:14:45]  Peter: Maybe—I said maybe it depends a bit on the drugs, to be fair.

[00:14:47]  Bruce: It depends on how much drugs you're taking.

[00:14:51]  Cameo: There is also, because most drugs have been Schedule 1 for a long time, there's not actually a whole lot of great research into how drugs impact us. Honestly, in my opinion, I think there's a limited amount of research that we… I think it's a really new area.

[00:15:16]  Bruce: Let me be clear though, certain drugs, it is uncontroversial that they affect cognitive capacity in important ways. For example, alcohol.

[00:15:24]  Cameo: Alcohol, absolutely.

[00:15:27]  Bruce: That's what I'm really getting at. It's not that all drugs affect cognitive capacity, but the very fact that there exists drugs that affect cognitive capacity, that can't be explained in terms of a person's interests, which is what Brett's trying to root it in. Very clear. Now we're talking about the exact same person, just whether they're on drugs or they're off drugs. Cognitive decline due to age. Another really great example that just really flies in the face of Brett's theory is a person who's very intelligent, scores well on an IQ test, they get older and they experience cognitive decline. I'm not even talking yet about senility. We could bring up senility as a good counterexample to Brett's theory too. We're just talking about regular ageing cognitive decline. What's going on there? It's the same person, it's the same interests. They should have more time.

[00:16:17]  Bruce: It's supposed to be a factor under Brett's theory of time and interest. This person has had more time to pursue their interests. Why are they having a cognitive decline? And the person reports it. This is the same person. They say, oh, as I've gotten older, I can tell I'm experiencing cognitive decline. I can't keep up as much anymore. Something's changed about my brain, where I just I'm not as smart as I used to be. What's going on there? How is that explained under Brett's theory? Okay. Or rather, it can't be explained under Brett's theory. It is a counterexample to Brett's theory. For that matter, a person losing their sanity. Now, this is a little different, I admit. But if a person loses their sanity for whatever reason, they get some virus in the brain as that one paper I've talked about by the BYU professor, they get hit on the head. Just something goes wrong genetically at a certain age and they end up with schizophrenia. A person with a lack of sanity has something wrong with their brain, and it somehow affects their cognitive ability to criticize things, and they end up believing weird things that if their brain was working correctly, they would never believe because they'd be able to easily criticize the theory.

[00:17:30]  Bruce: Furthermore, so what's going on there? How do you explain that in terms of time and interest? For that matter, all of us have experienced this because that's what dreams are. When you're in a dream, you're basically an insane person. You're experiencing all these weird wacky things, and they all just make sense to you, and then you wake up and you go, what was I thinking? If you actually were not—if you're actually fully lucid in a dream, which sometimes happens, but it's rare, you can immediately detect that you're in a dream, but you never can in a normal dream. Why? It's because your ability to criticize has been disabled to some degree. What's going on there? We all experience this. We all know what it feels like to be in that state, because we all dream. How do you explain that in terms of Brett's theory?

[00:18:20]  Peter: Brett's theory would probably emphasize that things like insanity or mental decline, it's really just a matter of having bad theories or worse theories about…

[00:18:33]  Bruce: Why would somebody have a worse theory just because they got older? It doesn't make sense. Now, I've actually talked with Brett a little bit about this. He's a little hard to ask questions about things like that. He jumps in, says something, makes a statement, and then jumps back out. He did at one point admit that there is such a thing as brain damage, and brain damage can cause you to have some of these problems, and that he's not necessarily ruling that possibility out. Well, now, it's not too hard to see, though, that the moment you accept that that's true, why might it not be that even people we would consider more or less normal, have some problem that interferes with their ability to learn certain types of things? If brain damage can cause that, why can't just having a weird development in the brain cause that? Again, we know that this is the case.

[00:19:23]  Bruce: There's Williams syndrome. We've talked about Williams syndrome. We actually understand which gene is wrong, what the problem is, how it affects the physiology, and why that affects the development of the brain. The net result is, is the person struggles to understand math, but has a really easy time getting into learning social things and dealing with people socially.

[00:19:45]  Peter: Well, it really opens up a can of worms because then you can also think, well, maybe all our brains are damaged.

[00:19:51]  Bruce: Right. Exactly.

[00:19:52]  Peter: In various ways. I mean, which kind of makes sense to me.

[00:19:55]  Bruce: It actually does to me too. The point I'm trying to make here is that there really are legitimate problems that exist with Brett's theory. Now, when I asked Brett and the people that were on the thread to explain these things, said, okay, can you show me how you would look at these examples? Here's what they said. I'm going to do some quoting here or paraphrasing some cases, in some cases quoting other cases. Here's a quote. Bringing up stuff like Down syndrome just confuses things further. We don't know how ailments like that affect the mind, since we don't know how minds work. Your argument attempts to connect empirical phenomena in a non-explanatory way with an alternative theory of learning which is itself non-explanatory. Appealing to more phenomena in a non-explanatory way as stuff which you are just declaring to be in contradiction to Brett's theory, despite having no explanation for how something like Down syndrome affects the mind or how even a healthy mind works in comparison, makes no sense. All you're doing at this point is the modern scientific equivalent to a dark age Christians associating or correlating the presence of certain bodily fluids with things like seizures and declaring them to be evidence of demonic possession. If you could say, here is my explanation of intelligence as a quantity, here is my explanation for why such and such exam results can be proxies of it, and here is how I have calibrated everything to predict what that correlation will be and an explanation all the way down, then he says he would see that as different.

[00:21:27]  Bruce: Then we can have a critical discussion about those explanations. But any explanationless statistical associations, which are alleged to be connected to intelligence, but exactly how is unexplained, and it's also unexplained how, why exactly intelligence is quantifiable, then no. Okay, so what he's saying is that none of these counterexamples to Brett's theory count, and that the reason why none of them count is because that the alternative theory, the theory of IQ, is non-explanatory. Since their theory is, quote, explanatory and IQ is non-explanatory, and just is about a correlation between a test and results on a test and nothing more than that, then their theory is the better theory, and it does not matter that their theory has these other issues, and they don't even feel the need to explain. What's the problem from a Popperian standpoint with what he's saying? In essence, he's saying, no problem with my theory counts as a problem unless the competing theory has a full explanation.

[00:22:27]  Bruce: There is nothing in Popper's epistemology to that effect, nor could there ever be, and it still be an effective epistemology. The counter examples to your theory is a counter example to your theory, regardless of the state of the other theory under Popper's epistemology. Okay, this is the whole point of conjecture and refutation. You don't need a second theory to develop problems with your theory and take the problems with your theory seriously. So they're trying to say, the problems with our theory don't count because the other theory is non-explanatory. So our theory wins no matter what problems you raise. That is absolutely almost the opposite of what Popper had in mind, where you're supposed to be saying, look, here's my theory and here are the problems with my theory. Here's the things my theory can't explain. And this is a scandal. This is something that we need to do something about. Let's figure out how to use our theory to address these or to adjust our theory or to throw our theory out and come up with something better. That's what you're supposed to be doing under critical rationalism.

[00:23:31]  Bruce: You don't get to give your theory a pass because there's this problem with the supposed competing theory. This is the first and most important of the issues we're going to raise with how they're going about this. This would be equivalent to saying, sure, Newton can explain sets of correlations like how fast objects accelerate towards the Earth, but it can't explain what gravity is. Aristotelian physics, it explains what gravity is, so therefore, it's a better theory. In fact, I just want to point out that go far enough back in time and that argument got made. In fact, Newton was bothered enough by that argument because it was so popular, that he admitted that he didn't know what gravity was, and he felt like that was a problem with his theory. [Overlapping words unclear.] Which is, by the way, why Newton was a good scientist. Okay, but you can't dismiss Newton's theory using that approach. That's just not how Karl Popper's epistemology works.

[00:24:29]  Bruce: You can talk about the problems of IQ theory, you can talk about how it has a low explanatory power, which is true. But you can't use that to excuse the problems in your theory. Your theory's problems are its theory's problems, period, end of story. So this is the first problem with how they're going about trying to defend their theory. Now, let's talk about, is the prevailing theory non-explanatory? Because that's their big claim, that the prevailing theory, IQ theory, is non-explanatory. So here's another quote. I don't want to put words in Brett's mouth, so I'll just say that I see his claim as an explanatory argument for what learning consists of. It consists of people creating explanations to solve problems. It follows from this and other arguments about the limits of explanation, et cetera, that what explains some people being better at some things like math, while other people are better at sports and they're crap with maths, is that different people have spent times on solving different problems. So this is kind of the stance that they're trying to take here. Is that the prevailing theory, the IQ theory, that it's non-explanatory and non-explanatory theories aren't scientific, so they're outside of the realm of what Popper counts as good explanations.

[00:25:42]  Bruce: Now, are they right about this? No, they're not. Okay, this is the second big mistake they're making. They're trying to treat explanatory-ness as a binary, and it's not, nor could it ever have been. And Popper makes this very clear. You read Logic of Scientific Discovery, and he goes really far into this. By the way, Peter, why I highly recommend reading that book. I don't think he ever explains this well outside of that book. I haven't read all his books. Maybe he does in some of the books, but it was in Logic of Scientific Discovery where I came to understand this aspect of Popper's epistemology. Let's take an actual example that's analogous to the argument that they're trying to make. Let's have the theory, eating oranges stops scurvy. Now, this was a real theory that really existed back in 1700s, 1800s, or whatever. Not everybody agreed, and some people thought that other types of fruit stopped scurvy. There was even a case where they brought, I can't remember what it was, some other fruit on the journey because they thought the orange theory was false, and then they all died of scurvy because they happened to accidentally pick a fruit that was low in vitamin C.

[00:26:48]  Bruce: But the theory, eating oranges stops scurvy, is a completely legitimate scientific explanation, in that form right there on its own. It is low on explanation. It has low explanatory power, but it doesn't have no explanatory power.

[00:27:07]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:27:08]  Peter: You could say our genes very likely influence our IQ, our capabilities, even if we don't know exactly what we can't point to this gene and this gene…

[00:27:18]  Bruce: You're getting it. IQ theory is a legitimate scientific theory in the same sense that eating oranges stops scurvy is a legitimate scientific theory. It's scandalous that it's low on explanation, but that doesn't mean it has no explanation, and it doesn't mean it's not a legitimate scientific theory. Now, what defines a legitimate scientific theory, according to Popper? It's testability. IQ theory, as I just mentioned, has survived refutations, things that would have refuted it, that makes it a legitimate scientific theory, period, end of story, under Popper's epistemology. There is no other criteria under Popper's epistemology other than it could have been falsified by observation. It could have clashed with experience. Now, let's understand what the Deutschians are getting at, though, because they're actually getting at something that's true.

[00:28:09]  Bruce: Again, I want to always emphasize that even when you're wrong, you might be partially right, and I think they are partially right. The Deutschian view is that the theory isn't a theory at all. That a theory like eating oranges stops scurvy isn't a theory at all, it's just a correlation until you have a full explanation of how the body works, and what it is in oranges that stops scurvy, and what the explanatory mechanisms connecting them altogether, and then they'll take it as an actual scientific theory. Well, no, that's not what we want. If you had to do that, it would be really hard to get scientific theories off the ground, because it requires so much knowledge from other theories, that basically it's impossible to come up with initial scientific theories to get us going. It just isn't what we want. We do not want the demarcation between science and non-science, empirical and non-empirical theories. We don't want it to be that you have to have this deep explanatory network all the way down, like they're saying. You want it to be testability, period, end of story.

[00:29:10]  Bruce: That's what Popper's epistemology says.

[00:29:12]  Peter: Isn't it a very Popperian idea that our theories are always incomplete?

[00:29:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:29:19]  Bruce: Now, the reason why we want that is because explanations exist in a hierarchy. Explanatory power exists in a hierarchy, a partial order hierarchy. So eating oranges stops scurvy, that's a valid explanation. But vitamin C stops scurvy, that's also a valid explanation and it's a better explanation. First of all, it's more specific. When you're more specific like that, you're more testable. Think about how, let's say that I wanted to refute vitamin C stops scurvy, but I wanted to still say oranges stop scurvy. Well, in theory, that could be true. It could be that oranges have something other than vitamin C in them that stops scurvy. But you can't do the other way around. Because oranges have vitamin C, if you refute that oranges stop scurvy, you've also refuted vitamin C stops scurvy. So there's a partial—there's an order that exists between these two explanations.

[00:30:16]  Bruce: One of them has more explanatory power than the other and encompasses the other one. It keeps going. We could say vitamin C stops scurvy because vitamin C is needed for making collagen an important component in connective tissue. Look that up on Google. I don't know what it means either. But that's what I found when I Googled how does vitamin C stop scurvy. We now have a theory of why vitamin C stops scurvy that is more like what the Deutschians are looking for, where it understands the exact mechanisms inside the body and how vitamin C affects those mechanisms. We now have those deep explanatory theories available to us. But you don't start life that way. You don't. You start with eating oranges stop scurvy. That has to be legitimate. That's what IQ theory is. IQ theory is a first attempt that is low on explanation, but is empirical and therefore means something scientifically, and deserves to be taken seriously. You do not get to just dismiss it because you see it as low explanation.

[00:31:19]  Bruce: This is how explanatory power actually relates in a hierarchy like this. This is how Popper looks at it. The example he gives, by the way, is planets have an orbit that are ellipses versus planets have an orbit that are circles. Which of those two is the more empirical theory? Stop and think about that for a second. It blows your mind. You can't figure it out, can you? There's an ordering between those two. There's a relationship that exists between circles and ellipses. What is it?

[00:31:47]  Unidentified speaker: They're continuous?

[00:31:49]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:31:50]  Bruce: Well, they're both continuous. All circles are ellipses, but not all ellipses are circles.

[00:31:55]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, okay.

[00:31:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:57]  Bruce: Of those two theories, all planets follow a circular orbit, that's the better of the two theories according to Popper, because it has higher empirical content. It's easier to refute it because an observation that refutes it, doesn't refute the theory that they follow ellipses, but all observation that refute that they follow ellipses also refutes the theory that they follow circles. Do you see the connection there? This is the actual Popperian epistemology and how it actually applies. And that's what we need to apply to IQ theory. Okay. Now, let's go—[overlap]

[00:32:35]  Peter: You don't just throw it out because it doesn't explain everything.

[00:32:40]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:32:41]  Peter: It has problems, of course, but there is…

[00:32:44]  Bruce: Okay. Let me go back to one of the quotes. Brett's theory is explanatory. It is true that it doesn't make empirical predictions, but they're not synonymous. This is a quote from one of the people who was defending his theory. Brett added a clarification himself to the point about empirical predictions on his theory. Now, here's the clarification from Brett. Insofar as it makes predictions, his theory makes predictions, they are identical to the predictions of the prevailing view, namely that people will differ in their performances on IQ tests. It just won't attribute the cause of that to inherent differences in intelligence or better capacity to learn. They're saying, look, our theory actually does make empirical predictions. It just happens to make the exact same empirical predictions that IQ theory does. We just have a different explanation.

[00:33:32]  Bruce: Where they have no explanation, we have an explanation as to why there's these differences on IQ tests. Let's talk about why those statements are wrong. At issue here is that they're trying to ignore something objective, the outcomes of experiments, and instead they're trying to look at explanatory power, which there's no objective way to actually measure, and except as does it have more empirical content. Popper always tries to measure explanatory power in terms of empirical content. The reason why is because it's the only way to do it. Even then, he admits it's really hard to know. Explanatory power exists as a partial order, and there's cases where you can say, this theory has much higher explanatory empirical content than its other. The example of oranges versus vitamin C versus vitamin C creates collagen. I intentionally picked those because those clearly are in an ordered state where one theory is always clearly better than the next.

[00:34:33]  Bruce: But if you really think about scientific theories in general, most of the time it's not clear which theory has more empirical content. Popper admits this is the case. He admits that we don't actually always know which theory is the better theory because of that. But this is one of the reasons why he has a demarcation. That's why he's trying to say, look, I'm just talking about empirical theories. I'm applying my epistemology, at least initially, he's applying his epistemology to empirical theories. There's no concept in Popper of bringing up metaphysical theories as competitors to empirical theories. This is something that the Deutschians do all the time, but Popper never does. Their claim is our theory is highly explanatory and the prevailing theory is not, and our theory is at least as empirical as theirs, because we make the same predictions that they do.

[00:35:23]  Bruce: We just explain it differently. Therefore, we judge our theory as better on explanatory power, even though ultimately we really admit it has no empirical outcomes that you can measure. Now, this is all very reminiscent of Popper's own explanation as how he came up with his epistemology, and why he hooks his epistemology to his demarcation criteria. Here's a quote from Popper. I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx were impressed by the theory's apparent explanatory power. Marx's theory appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened. The study of Marx's theory seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation opening your eyes to new hidden truths from those not yet initiated. Now, let me give you an example of how that's precisely how Brett's theory gets used. He says the attempt to test for, in scare quotes, test for intelligence differences amongst people is not merely a moral error.

[00:36:21]  Bruce: It is an anti-human fundamental misunderstanding of what minds are. It is just a category error. No experiment can test for subjective experience, conscious or what someone is thinking. So it's interesting that, and this is why they love this theory so much. They always are bringing up these moral consequences of the theory, and that seems to be what interests them the most in the theory, since by their own admission, it has no testable consequences. They admitted at one point that it really was a metaphysical or philosophical theory that made no actual predictions that could clash with it. But they're really interested in these moral consequences. So I see an analogy here. What differentiates Brett's theory in its quote, explanatory power from communism, which was Marx's theories, which were loved for their explanatory power. This is exactly what Popper's epistemology was trying to get at. And I think this is what they've missed, is we don't care about explanatory power in a case like communism, or in the case of Brett's theory, unless we can connect it to real life somehow as an empirical theory. It's not that we necessarily throw the philosophical theory out.

[00:37:36]  Bruce: Popper is very clear, philosophical theories are not meaningless. They're not garbage. Okay. And I'm not suggesting they are. And that's why I keep saying positive things about Brett's theory. I think that there's something there that needs further development.

[00:37:48]  Peter: There's a certain logical coherence to it that really appeals to me, just as a theory.

[00:37:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:37:58]  Peter: I think he might emphasize that, okay, if we can't do something in this world, well, it's basically because we're not interested in it, or we don't have the right theories that allow us to do it. And I think that is true at some level. But it just seems to me there's got to be a way to... I can't really see quite how that completely refutes the idea that IQ theory…

[00:38:26]  Bruce: Yes, and the two ideas aren't incompatible. If you really think about it, right? I mean, it's okay. So to Popper, the explanatory power of an explanation only counts if the explanatory theory actually explains something empirical. As Deutsch put it, a theory that explains everything explains nothing. Therein lies the problem with Brett's theory, or at least the way they're treating Brett's theory. They're saying this theory has no empirical consequences. It does not matter what issues you bring up. Okay, this is a philosophical theory. It's not meant to be tested. So I reject all your tests that you're giving me. But that makes their theory exactly what Deutsch is teaching against, and Popper teaching against. They're now saying our theory explains every possible outcome. It just gives it a different explanation. But that's exactly what we don't want.

[00:39:20]  Bruce: That is what we mean by bad explanation. Communism explains every possible outcome, and thus it explains nothing. Their theory explains every possible outcome, and thus it explains nothing. Communism is what we call not even wrong. Having a theory that is wrong isn't the scandal. It's having a theory that can't be wrong that is the scandal. Quantum mechanics, it is a refuted theory. It's a wrong theory that doesn't make it a bad explanation. It doesn't even make it our best explanation. [Wording retained; the following sentence asserts that it is our best explanation.] It actually is our best explanation of physics. The fact that the theory is wrong is no scandal at all when you really get down to it. Having a theory that can't be shown to be wrong, that's what you're trying to avoid, if that makes any sense. So literally a refuted explanation is considered better, any refuted explanation, that would be a competitor to communism, would be considered better than communism, because communism can't be refuted. Now, I'm acting as if communism can't be refuted, but actually Popper makes the case that it can. So I want to come back to that in a bit, because there's a little bit more going on here.

[00:40:32]  Bruce: At the moment, I'm sort of taking the Deutschians at face value, that their theory is a philosophical theory, that it can't be refuted. I'm taking at face value the stance that communism is a metaphysical theory that can't be refuted and therefore doesn't count as a scientific theory.

[00:40:47]  Peter: You're refuting it in a way by pointing out that it can't be refuted.

[00:40:51]  Bruce: Well, what I'm really saying is this. If they are right that these theories, if communism really can't be refuted, and if Brett's theory really can't be refuted, that's worse than being wrong. They shouldn't have gone there under Popper's epistemology. What they should have said, they should have preferred saying, oh yes, our theory does have consequences, and allow it to be refuted because a refuted theory is no scandal. It could still be largely right. It could still be mostly right. It could still be the best possible theory, and therefore we embrace it as if it's true in the case of quantum mechanics. They're getting too worried about refutations and they shouldn't. Refutations aren't bad. Do you understand where I'm going with this here? They shouldn't have wanted to make their theory a philosophical theory. The moment I was giving examples of how it could be tested, that's what they should have cared about.

[00:41:50]  Bruce: They should have said, oh yes, that's a test of our theory. I guess that that didn't work out. That's a problem. That doesn't mean we're abandoning our theory. That doesn't mean our theory is ultimately not going to be found to be right at its core. Right. It just means that right now, there's an issue with our theory and we don't know what it is. That's a much better response than trying to move your theory to be an irrefutable theory and to try to make it so that it can accept every possible outcome so that it can't get refuted. That's what you never want under Popper's epistemology. That is the worst possible scandal under Popper's epistemology, whereas being wrong is no scandal at all under Popper's epistemology. To Popper, the relevant explanatory power is always deeply linked to its ability to make actual empirical predictions. That's why Deutsch says, if it explains everything, it explains nothing.

[00:42:39]  Bruce: It has to be able to clash with experience. This is why communism may have lots of supposed explanatory power, but we as critical rationalists just don't care. It doesn't mean that we think it's even wrong. Popper never says communism is wrong. He's trying to just point out, it's just a bad explanation. If there's any truth to it and there may well be, he goes through places where he thinks it might be true. It has to be turned into an actual theory that could clash with experience before it can really start being treated as a competitor in the space of science. Until then, it's just an interesting metaphysical theory. It's hard to know what to do with it, and it just is outside of the scientific debate. It can have its own debate in the metaphysical space, it's not part of the scientific debate. You don't give it credit. You don't credit communism by saying, oh, it has high explanatory power.

[00:43:32]  Bruce: When it's explanatory power has no testable consequences. The reason why is very simple. It's because it's really easy to make a high explanatory power theory that is all internally logically consistent, but has no consequences. It's so easy to do that. You can have it for the asking. By itself, that's a meaningless thing to reference. When we reference the power of explanation that's in the space of Empirical Theories that's always going to be meant as, how do you tie that to actual testable outcomes? This is the concept of reach. These theories have reach that they, you may have made them up to solve one problem, but they have things that you can actually test in totally other domains. They're totally outside of what the theory was originally created to solve. Now, sometimes you can't test them. This is another thing that happens, is that sometimes a theory starts off metaphysical, but actually it is a scientific theory.

[00:44:29]  Bruce: It's just that we don't yet have the instruments that allow us to test it. It's practically metaphysical today, but in the future it'll get tested once we reach the right levels of knowledge and can build the instruments that are necessary for it. But that's what we want. You can start with metaphysical theory, then nothing wrong with that, anything wrong with backing a metaphysical theory [wording unclear], nothing wrong with maybe even dogmatically backing a metaphysical theory.

[00:44:51]  Peter: I guess for myself, one test I keep coming back to for this metaphysical theory, is that I just want to see that low IQ 45-year-old who learns the right theories about learning and transforms themselves into a quantum physicist or something. I just don't see people changing that much. It just all of my life experiences with humans seem to indicate that you're kind of born with the temperament and capabilities that you were born with. And yeah, you can adjust that with the right theories. And sure, that's not something to ignore, but people don't seem to change that much.

[00:45:36]  Bruce: Right. Also, the moral theories that they're getting out of this, they always ignore the other moral consequences, which I think is unfortunate. For example, I mentioned the idea that my mentally challenged neighbor, if really the fact that he can't take care of himself and his parents have to take care of him, really just comes down to he didn't value the knowledge of how to take care of himself, which is really what they're claiming.

[00:46:00]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:46:01]  Bruce: Well, that has a moral consequence. Completely different moral consequence than our current attitude towards him, which is that we need to take care of him because he couldn't help himself. I don't think their theory ultimately will end up with the moral consequences they think it does. Right? They're trying to use it as this revelation today of we need to not IQ test people, and we're categorizing people, making category errors. But they're completely ignoring that if you actually take their theory seriously, it's got much bigger moral problems than what they're claiming.

[00:46:36]  Peter: Like I said, I've worked as a special ed teacher and Down syndrome is a little extreme, but I've worked with perfectly normal kids who are very intelligent in their own way, and might be artistic and creative in other ways, but then they just can't really get their mind around just fractions or something, basic things. It's not that maybe they don't find it the most fascinating thing in the world, but most of us really don't. There's just a block in their brains that they just can't really get it.

[00:47:14]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, I think that's very common.

[00:47:16]  Bruce: Let me go back to one of Brett's quotes again because I want to emphasize this. Brett says, insofar as his theory makes predictions, they are identical to the predictions of the prevailing view, namely that people will differ in their performance and IQ tests [wording retained]. It just won't attribute that cause to the inherent differences in intelligence. I just want to emphasize this. That statement is entirely false. Absolutely completely false. Brett's theory does not make the same predictions as the prevailing theory. Now, we talked about this, right? The whole idea of g-factor, that's different tests and IQ theory actually could have died out. It could have been that IQ theory made this prediction that people have this single score of intelligence, and they suddenly had this idea, very reasonable idea that maybe that just isn't true. Maybe people have different intelligences, which really matches Brett's theory. So they tried to test for that by looking at people's scores on these different kinds of IQ tests and did they not correlate.

[00:48:23]  Bruce: If we had found that they did not correlate, that would have been perceived as a refutation of IQ theory, but that isn't what we found. Therefore IQ theory was corroborated, which is just a fancy word for it survived a potential refutation, a test that could have refuted it. To say that Brett's theory makes the same prediction as IQ theory in this case, just is not true. The real truth is, is that Brett's theory accepts all possible outcomes, whereas IQ theory can be refuted. That is, those are not the same thing. They're not even close to the same thing. What's going on here is, by the way, had we actually found these tests, like let's say this happened recently and we started testing, oh, maybe there's different kinds of tests. We found that all these different tests were actually no correlation between them. Do you really think Brett wouldn't have immediately trumpeted that as see my theory is right?

[00:49:24]  Bruce: Of course, he would have. To try to put this into Popperian terms, Brett would have accepted the positive evidence for his theory, but he won't accept any refutations of his theory. That's positivism, is it not? To put this in maybe better Popperian terms, Brett's theory accepts all possible outcomes. He would have exalted that, he would have said, oh my gosh, see, we've disproven IQ theory, our competitor, if it had been refuted. But no matter which way that experiment went, he was going to claim his theory wasn't refuted. That's what we mean by accepts all possible outcomes, which is if he's right, if his theory actually does accept all possible outcomes like that, then it falls into the category of communism. It's a non-explanatory theory. It's a theory that has quote, an explanatory power, but none of it counts, because it has no empirical consequences at all.

[00:50:19]  Bruce: It's just a philosophical theory. It just does not belong in the same discussion as an empirical scientific theory like IQ. Now, here's the question. How did they miss this fairly fundamental requirement of critical rationalism? Because this is how critical rationalism works. You do not get to advance philosophical theories as competitors to scientific theories. Why is that? Here's the thing. When people say that, when I say this to people and I say this to fans of David Deutsch, they argue with me a lot. They always say, no, that's not true. You should allow all possible criticisms to a theory. Therefore, let's allow all theories into the discussion. They're not entirely wrong. I'll explain what they're getting right and what they're getting wrong here in just a second. But this is clearly not what Popper had in mind. He had a demarcation in mind. He had empirical theories are in their own group. They're special.

[00:51:18]  Bruce: That doesn't mean non-empirical theories are bad or that we should ignore them, or that they aren't valuable. He even saw his own theory is non-empirical, by the way. Let's discuss that in a second too. Clearly, he didn't think they were bad theories. But he would never try to advance his own theory as an alternative to some scientific theory and try to disprove the scientific theory using his theory. He would never do that. He did see them as being separate categories. What's going on that the Deutschians throw that criteria out that Popper believed in? It seems like it comes down to how Deutsch explains critical rationalism in his books. There's two problems that come up. One is that Deutsch emphasizes the importance of any kind of criticism, and he makes empirical experiments simply one kind of criticism. Now, that's all true. Just obviously, experiments are a kind of criticism, but they're only one possible kind of criticism. I'm not disagreeing with what Deutsch is saying. But the fans have incorrectly come away from that point with the idea that therefore it's okay to advance metaphysical theories as competitors to empirical theories, especially if the metaphysical theory in their minds seems like it has a really good explanation, and therefore has lots of explanatory power.

[00:52:35]  Bruce: This is the way they're kind of thinking about it. And it's contrary to what Popper originally had in mind. Popper never allowed for metaphysical theories to be competitors to empirical theories like that. Now, the Deutschians have said, give me some fairly good reasons [wording unclear], and let me go through them because they are actually good reasons why they think that Popper is wrong on that. Okay, a lot of them don't even realize Popper said that. And some of them, none of them are willing to say, no, Popper didn't say that because I think they know, I probably know what I'm talking about. They just don't agree with Popper, or maybe I'm just misquoting Popper. They're not really sure. But I'm actually getting Popper right on this. And here's the example that they use. They'll say, okay, here's the problem, Bruce. We can demonstrate that an empirical theory doesn't, let's say that we can demonstrate an empirical theory doesn't solve the problem that it was out to do.

[00:53:23]  Bruce: Wouldn't it just make sense at that point to accept that the non-empirical theory is the better theory? Okay, because in other words, it's possible to come up with criticisms of an empirical theory that would undermine it so severely, that maybe we would prefer the metaphysical theory instead. This is their argument to me. When I asked them for examples, the example that they gave, the main one they gave was, what if it doesn't even solve the right problem? They give other examples, it's internally inconsistent, things like that. This is actually a correct statement because obviously we do care. If an empirical theory doesn't solve the problem that it was actually setting out to solve, that really would be the end of that empirical theory. I don't want to downplay the point they're trying to make because it's a correct point. But they're misunderstanding what Popper is doing.

[00:54:15]  Bruce: This is a—not, we're not—Popper is not claiming that all empirical theories are always better than metaphysical theories. That's not what he's claiming. We're talking about a convention. It's a very simple convention and it just exists as a convention because the alternative is bad. If we're allowed to advance non-empirical theories as competitors to empirical theories. Now remember, non-empirical theories cannot be tested by definition. If we're allowed to do that and the only thing we need to do is show that it has quote explanatory power but in no way relates to empirical outcomes. Every single empirical theory is now inferior to just an infinity of non-empirical theories that are just easy to think up. It's a convention. It's not that—it's not the way… There may be an actual metaphysical theory that is better actually in real life than its empirical competitor. That might actually be the case. But it doesn't matter because if we're going to just decide, well, this is the better theory even though it's non-empirical as of today, then Popper's epistemology is done.

[00:55:26]  Bruce: It's entirely refuted as an epistemology. It's got no value at all. It's just a necessary convention. We're not claiming that it's impossible that a metaphysical theory might be a better explanation. In fact, it can be. Let me explain to you how it actually work under Popper's epistemology. Clearly, a metaphysical theory might actually be true while the empirical theory is false. And in that case, why not just prefer metaphysical theory? What's going on here? Because it seems like they're making a decent argument against this convention, and yet they're not really explaining what to do in place of the convention. And the convention seems necessary, or we can't make Popper's epistemology actually work. Do you follow what I'm trying to say here? There's a real problem here that I want to try to address. And they're bringing out a real problem. But do you see what I'm saying about why it's a necessary convention, that we don't allow empirical—non-empirical theories to be advanced against empirical theories as competitors?

[00:56:25]  Peter: I'm hanging on just barely. I think I see where you're going. It's an interesting question. I'll say that.

[00:56:33]  Bruce: Empirical theories are special. This is what Popper's really getting at. And it's difficult to turn a philosophical theory into an empirical theory, with, for example, without first dealing with things like, this theory doesn't even solve the right problem. Now, I'm not saying that that could never happen. Maybe it could. I asked them for examples. I knew it was difficult. So I said, can you give me real life examples? I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm just saying, give me actual examples of empirical theories that have a non-empirical competitor in the scientific realm where we actually prefer the non-empirical theory. One of them came up with one example, and the rest could not come up with any examples. Well, it doesn't surprise me because it's hard.

[00:57:16]  Peter: What about, can I put out one?

[00:57:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:57:19]  Peter: What about, is it Chester—Chesterton's… Why can't I get that word out? Chesterton's fence where they were, you know, if you default to tradition in a sense, you know what I'm talking about? I think we've discussed this before.

[00:57:36]  Bruce: The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind existing set of affairs is understood.

[00:57:41]  Peter: Whereas how I understand it is that, you know, you have maybe a rationalist who would probably just want to go with empirical theories all the way. Whereas what Chesterton might say is that we should default to the wisdom of tradition, which is maybe its own kind of metaphysical theory.

[00:58:06]  Bruce: Let's come back to that one. That's a good example, actually. The example that they came up with, there was like three or four of them I was discussing this with. They came up with one example, but it was in the area of economics. And that doesn't surprise me either, right? Because economics, actually, it's really questionable whether they even count as scientific theories. Most economists feel like their theories clash with the whole concept of falsificationism because most of the theories can't be falsified. So it's not too surprising that they weren't able to come up with a scientific theory that was an example. Now, you're talking about Chesterton's fence. Now, first of all, let's admit Chesterton's fence is not a scientific theory.

[00:58:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:58:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:58:52]  Unidentified speaker: Fair enough.

[00:58:54]  Bruce: And this is one of the things they bring up is they'll say, well, Popper's own epistemology is metaphysical. So, Bruce, you can't say all empirical theories are better than all metaphysical theories. By the way, I never said that, that's them putting words in my mouth, because Popper's own epistemology is metaphysical, and yet it's true, and yet it's a best theory. Let's, we've got to, you have to understand how Popper looks at this. What are the competitors to Popper's theory? They're not scientific theories. They're things like induction, right? They're philosophical theories. So, yes, you can have a best metaphysical theory in a realm of metaphysical theories. And a lot of times what really makes metaphysical theories good is that they have just kind of a logic to them, where you're not even sure what the alternative would be, right? When I, when I take Popper's theory and I say something like, well, what Popper's saying is, is that we should embrace the theory that is best survived experiment and or criticism, and that that is our best theory. It's really hard to come up with an alternative to that.

[01:00:01]  Bruce: I don't know how you would test that aspect of his theory, but it's really hard to even come up with what other definition of best should exist. And it's what Popper calls the logic of the situation. OK, Darwinian evolution has this idea of survival of the fittest that, you know, Deutsch has criticized that phrase survival of the fittest. But let's go with kind of the standard Popperian way of looking at this that Popper himself wrote about. Survival of the fittest isn't testable and it's central to Darwinian theory. And the reason why it's not testable is because the definition of fittest is that which survives. So it's circular. So Popper was really disturbed by that fact that he wasn't sure that that that that allowed Darwinian evolution to count as a scientific theory, because it was at heart, it was an untestable theory, or so he claimed. Now I didn't stop Popper [opening word unclear] from taking that core of Darwinian theory and making it the core of his theory.

[01:01:01]  Bruce: And this is what I'm trying to get at. It's got nothing to do with value of the theory. It's a matter of how we compare theories, right, that you don't choose to cross between the demarcation boundary, just because by convention, if you allow that, you create your problem for yourself. So does that make a problem for Popper's theory, though? By the way, just for the record, Darwinian theory is completely testable, and Popper was wrong about that. It's true that you can't test that one aspect of the theory. And actually, you kind of even can that. I mean, Deutsch gave some examples of how you might go about testing it, although he first rejected the concept of survival of the fittest to get there. But this is really where I'm trying to go with this. There's all sorts of things that they eventually came up with that are completely legitimate tests of Darwinism that would have refuted it had it gone a different direction. Theories don't have to stay metaphysical. If Brett's theory is a legitimate theory, which it may well be, the goal is to see its metaphysical state as a scandal that needs to be overcome and get it across the border into the empirical set as quickly as possible.

[01:02:15]  Bruce: Trying to figure out, look, if we take this theory seriously, what are the consequences of this theory? How do we turn this metaphysical, philosophical theory into a testable theory if it needs to compete with other empirical theories? That's really the right attitude, and it should have consequences, right? If it's actually a correct theory that differences in intelligence really just boil down to nothing more than what your interests are and how much time you spent on them, that is absolutely a theory that should have testable consequences. By that same token, let me point something else out. I'm kind of treating it like on the face that Popper's claim that his theory is metaphysical is even true, and I don't think it is. And this is one of the problems I've bumped into, is because Popper goes out of his way to say that his theory is metaphysical. And we even talked about this in the “Popper on Dogmatic”—it was “Popper Dogmatic”, where when he was asked, doesn't your theory fail its own criteria? Well, it didn't, because he was never claiming it was an empirical theory to begin with.

[01:03:23]  Bruce: So it didn't matter if it could be falsified or not. Okay, that was Popper's answer that he gave the reporter. And that is what Popper says in his books, too. If you carefully read Popper, he makes that quite clear. And instead, he says, I want to suggest that we measure my theory not based on empirical evidence, but on fruitfulness. Well, there's something weird about that proposal. Because I'm not really sure, and I'm not sure Popper was really sure what fruitfulness even meant. If we can measure the fruitfulness of his theory, and we can show in some way that his theory is more fruitful than another theory, isn't that a legitimate empirical test? And doesn't that therefore make his theory empirical, and therefore falsifiable, and therefore matching its own criteria, by the way? When we test a theory, we don't always necessarily test the central thesis. We test the consequences of the central thesis. We don't test survival of the fittest.

[01:04:20]  Bruce: We test in Darwinian evolution the consequences of the rest of the theory. Okay, that's what we're testing. You often can't test aspects of the theory directly. You cannot test directly the existence of a gravitational field. You can test the consequences of a gravitational field. This isn't that abnormal in science. Okay, let's talk through then the concept of counter examples in Popper's theory. Well, Popper's theory, the way you go about criticizing Popper's theory, and it's received quite a bit of criticism over the years, is you show that something in his theory has a counter example in science. This is what Kuhn did in our pre-show where we were talking about this. Kuhn demonstrated that there is this existence of this thing called normal science, where scientists actively tried to defend the theory rather than tried to refute it. He's pointed out this refuted Popper's theory by example. Is this not a case of Popper's theory, therefore having a counter example, and therefore being empirical in some sense?

[01:05:22]  Bruce: It's a slightly different understanding of the concept of empirical. It's not like we're actually doing an experiment, we're doing kind of like natural experiments. We're demonstrating since he's talking about how scientists work, if we can show that scientists work in a different way than what Popper says, then we've refuted Popper's theory. Popper's theory needs to be either thrown out in favor of a better theory, or it needs to be changed to be an improved theory. Keep in mind that when you refute a theory, it doesn't necessarily mean the other theory wins. It may be that you're refuting that theory in favor of a better version of your theory. So Darwinian evolution has been refuted many, many times over, and the modern version of Darwinian evolution is a much stronger, much more empirical theory than the original Darwinian theory. You don't think of it as refutations, which is one of the reasons why I have problems with calling it refutations. You think of it as Darwinian theory improving, but really you threw out an old version and you created a better version.

[01:06:16]  Bruce: And that's a kind of refutation that you have to pay attention to, even if it doesn't feel like a refutation. That's what's going on with Popper's theory. Lakatos, one of Popper's more famous students, he took Popper's theory, he noticed that there was a number of counter examples to it where Popper's theory was wrong. And he suggested his own version of critical rationalism. I don't think he calls it that. That it was based around the idea… Lakatos came up with some really interesting ideas. I think he's wrong on a bunch of things, by the way. For example, he became convinced it was impossible to refute a theory without a second theory. Now, does that sound familiar? Yes, Deutsch independently came up with the same idea. Lakatos beat him to it. I don't even know that Deutsch read Lakatos. I think Deutsch may have come up with that independent of Lakatos, but Lakatos beat him by decades. This really is one of the problems with Popper's theory.

[01:07:10]  Bruce: Popper's theory initially seems to have been aimed at the idea that you could refute a theory just by having an observation alone. Well, you can't, not with real scientific theories anyhow. You actually have to have a second theory that explains what's wrong, otherwise you don't know for sure if the refuting case, the counterexample, [refutes?] the theory itself or something, some auxiliary hypothesis that you're relying on.

[01:07:36]  Peter: Where does Deutsch say that?

[01:07:37]  Bruce: This is in his paper, The Logic of Scientific Experiments. I quoted extensively in my Popper Without Refutation blog posts. I really take a hard look at what Deutsch is saying, because it's an important tweak to Popper. Now, I did discover that Popper himself discovered this also, and basically admits to it in some of his later books. This would be an example of how Popper actually refuted his own theory through example and then replaced it with something better. Lakatos had this idea that there's this protective belt, that you have a research program, that there are certain aspects of the theory that you do not question and you do not try to falsify. You're trying to utilize them and take them as seriously as you can and take them to their logical conclusions. Well, I don't doubt that this actually happens in real life, and I don't doubt that Kuhn is right, that there's something called normal science, where you're actually trying to take the anomalies and counter examples that exist and you're trying to figure out how to integrate them into the theory. But if you actually understand Popper's Theory of Refutation as being a refutation of the combination of the theory plus the background knowledge, then normal science is a kind of refutation, and it's not actually anymore… [Sentence unfinished.]

[01:08:48]  Bruce: It would be a counter example to Popper's original theory. It's not a counter example to the improved versions of Popper's theory. Do you see where I'm going with this? Popper's theory is not clearly in the metaphysical realm, and in fact has counter examples, and in fact may count as a scientific theory too. It's not uncommon that theories sit uncomfortably between those two realms. We talked a lot about Campbell's theory. Campbell's theory, as far as I can tell, has exactly one testable consequence and it's wrong. Yet I still think it's a good theory that deserves attention because it has a lot of the logic of the situation that he's bringing in where I don't understand what the alternative would be. I can't even conceive the alternative in some cases. There's different things we can do. The reason why I'm bringing this all up is because the idea that Popper's theory is metaphysical and therefore that disproves this aspect of Popper's epistemology, is just a misunderstanding of Popper's epistemology. It's also misunderstands the fact that Popper's theory isn't as metaphysical as Popper thought it was.

[01:09:49]  Bruce: Let's go back now. Let's look at Brett's theory. I'm going to wrap this up now because this is what I've been building towards. Brett and his defenders of his theory are claiming their theory cannot clash with experience. I have noted now, it's actually better than it could… [Wording unclear.] His theory would be a better theory if it did clash with experience and was wrong because of that, than the current state of the theory where it supposedly can't clash with experience and therefore can explain any possible outcome. I take these ideas very seriously as a Popperian. That I want my theories to be wrong before I want them to be not even wrong. Now I need to ask a question though. Is Brett's theory actually non-empirical? Didn't I just at the beginning of this show give various counter examples to his theory?

[01:10:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:10:41]  Bruce: Okay, his theory not only can be refuted, not only is his theory empirical and can be refuted, it has been refuted. That's good. That's not bad. That's exactly what we want. I gave all these examples, the Down syndrome neighbor, cognitive decline due to age, the various experiments with IQ that should have gone a different way had his theory been true, but instead went in favor of IQ theory.

[01:11:09]  Peter: These are not things to be dismissed.

[01:11:10]  Bruce: No, they're not.

[01:11:11]  Unidentified speaker: That's the wrong attitude, I think.

[01:11:13]  Bruce: What they really do, though, I think the fear here is if I admit that these are counter examples to my theory, then my theory is valueless. That's wrong. What it really refutes is not the core of Brett's theory. It refutes Brett's theory in its current form. There may still be a great deal of truth to Brett's theory, and we need to figure out what that is. But you can't do that. You can't make improved theories until you start taking the problems with your theory seriously, which is what they're not doing. Or to put this in a somewhat different statement, right now they are immunizing their theory from refutation, and they need to stop doing that. Because you're not allowed to do that under Popper's epistemology. You don't want that under Popper's epistemology. That's the worst possible outcome under Popper's epistemology. They're not giving their theory enough credit, is what's going on.

[01:12:07]  Bruce: At some level, they like the moral side of the theory and the consequences that they can talk about, but they don't really want it to be a refuted theory. They need to stop treating it like it's a political theory like that, and they need to start taking it seriously as a scientific theory. The moment you do that, you immediately see this is in its current form a refuted theory, but that doesn't mean the theory is a bad theory. I don't feel that Brett and his defenders are giving their theory enough credit. They're trying to treat it like it's a political theory, and they're trying to immunize it from refutation, and they should stop doing that. They should treat it as the empirical scientific good explanation that it actually is and stop treating it like it's a bad explanation, something that needs to be protected from immunization—from refutation.

[01:12:58]  Bruce: I asked the question, why are they getting this wrong? I gave one point, which was that Deutsch talks about how experiments are only one kind of criticism. That's led to this idea that you can advance metaphysical theories as competitors to empirical theories. I'm just trying to explain why you don't want that. It's not that forever the two remain apart. It's that if you want to advance your metaphysical theory as a competitor to an empirical theory, you need to start really figuring out how to turn it into an empirical theory. That doesn't take much. It just needs to have some sort of test that it can survive, that was unexpected, or that is at odds with the existing theory. It's not really that high a standard. In fact, it's a very low standard. It's so low that Oranges stop scurvy counts as a legitimate empirical theory. So it doesn't take that much to get your theory over the border.

[01:13:58]  Bruce: And really, that's what they need to be concentrating on, is trying to get it over the border. And we just have to do that. It's not that we're throwing the theory out as valueless because it's not empirical. But then on the other hand, I'm saying actually the theory is empirical. And so it has made it across the border. So it actually is a fair competitor to IQ theory. The thing that they're getting wrong here, and this is the second problem that I've noticed, is that while Deutsch spends quite a bit of time on the importance of not having bad explanations, which he defines as theories that can be easily tweaked to fit any possible outcome—with any possible outcome. He misses the fact that every single theory, including really good theories like quantum physics, can be easily tweaked if you're willing to fit any possible outcome, if you're willing to make ad hoc saves of your theory. Now, Deutsch never talks about ad hoc saves.

[01:14:52]  Bruce: I don't think he disagrees with Popper on this. I just think it wasn't something that came up in his books. But it's actually important to understanding the concept of a bad explanation. And Deutsch never brings this out. And I think this is unfortunate because a lot of people who learn Popper, learn Popper through Deutsch. So let me explain Popper's idea of ad hoc saves and why they're important to his epistemology and how they relate to Deutsch's idea of a bad explanation. So Popper notices this fact that every explanation, every theory becomes easily tweaked if you allow ad hoc saves. So he suggests that we make conventions. Now a great deal of Popper's epistemology is just conventions. He says, I'm suggesting the following convention. He's not trying to justify it. He's not trying to bring it out of first principles. He's saying, if you think this is a bad convention, then suggest a better convention. But I don't think I can think of a better convention. It's just part of the logic of the situation.

[01:15:48]  Bruce: And a great deal of Popper's epistemology just boils down to those conventions. The idea of a demarcation that we don't allow non-empirical theories to be advanced as competitors to empirical theories is an example of such a convention. There's nothing special about it. It's not based on some deep truth. It's just a matter of there's no other way to do it. Well, ad hoc saves in the same way. So Popper says, when speaking of the best theory, notice how he actually uses the term the best theory, it is assumed that a good theory is not ad hoc. The idea of ad hocness and its opposite, which may perhaps be termed boldness, are very important. Ad hoc explanations are explanations which are not independently testable, independently that is of the effect to be explained. They can be had for the asking, and are therefore of little theoretical interest, at least to scientists. That comes from Objective Knowledge, pages 15 to 16. In Logic of Scientific Discovery, pages 19 and 20, he says, it is impossible that any theoretical system should ever—could ever—should ever be conclusively falsified.

[01:16:52]  Bruce: For it is always possible to find some way to evade falsification. For example, by introducing an ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis, or by changing ad hoc a definition. It is even possible without logical inconsistency to adopt the position of simply refusing to acknowledge any falsifying experience whatsoever. I must admit the justice of this criticism. I'm going to propose that the empirical methods should be characterized as a method that excludes precisely those ways of evading falsification by convention. It's just a convention. Here's the thing that you can see how this must be true. If I'm allowed to just advance any theory I want, and then you come up with some sort of refutation of it, and then you ad hoc save it, which is really what the defenders of Brett's theory were doing. If you're allowed to ad hoc save a theory like that, every theory is non-empirical.

[01:17:50]  Bruce: Every theory becomes metaphysical and becomes irrefutable. Again, by convention, we choose not to do that. Now, the convention goes a bit further. He says, of course, maybe the ad hoc save is correct. That's fine. Make the ad hoc save, but work out what its testable consequence is. Show how it has its own testable consequence separate from the save going on. Yes, it always has the one testable consequence. It changes the outcome of the test. So now you've changed your theory to accept that outcome, even though it should have been a refutation. If you're going to do that, you need to show why that ad hoc save you made had some other testable consequence. Then you need to perform that test. Then it's okay to save it that way. It's no longer considered an ad hoc save at that point. Again, this is a convention. Let's take an example of where the Defenders of Brett's Theory actually did this. It should make it really clear what Popper is getting at and why it matters. So one of the things that they brought out is they asked me, how would your mooted tests detect when a person tested had an agenda to appear to be average?

[01:19:08]  Bruce: And here's other quotes that all follow that same criticism. Whether someone is thinking I'm going to do my best on IQ tests or I will never, I never will or sometimes will or always will, except this time is not something any IQ test can tell you. Because of this, it is not science. The attempt to make it so is scientism. People choose what they want to do based on their fallible theories. Many would choose not to be subject to the test. Some of those that did could choose to subvert it as best they can. I mean, what's in it for them to be guinea pigs. But without an experiment to distinguish between the possibility that they are just choosing to subvert the tests and they've got low IQ, such a theory does not count as knowledge. Okay, so what they're doing is, is that they're offering an ad hoc save to their theory. They're saying, look, I don't care what the IQ test said because you haven't explained the possibility that maybe people are just intentionally failing IQ tests because they're just disinterested in them. And maybe that's the actual difference in IQ.

[01:20:14]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:20:15]  Peter: I mean, it seems to me there could be a grain of truth in what they say that doesn't completely ring false. [Brief following words unclear.]

[01:20:23]  Bruce: This is why ad hoc saves are so pernicious and why they have to be disallowed. Ad hoc saves could be true, but you have to not treat them as ad hoc saves. You have to treat them as actual scientific theories. And that's what the Deutschians are failing to do here. There's nothing wrong with their theory that maybe people are intentionally failing IQ tests intentionally. That could be. If that were true, I'd want to know that. Let's say that they propose this instead. Instead of trying to use it as an ad hoc save, instead of trying to say you can't possibly overcome this problem, they took responsibility for the ad hoc save, which is what they're expected to do under Popper's epistemology. And they say, I think maybe IQ tests are problematic because we're really measuring how interested the person is in taking such a test. So I propose that we test my theory by asking people how hard they tried on the test. If we find that the difference in IQ cannot be explained by the degree in which people claim they didn't try, then my view is refuted.

[01:21:27]  Bruce: Notice how we immediately took the exact same concern they're raising and we now raised it in a way that it's possible to falsify it. That's what makes it not an ad hoc save anymore. Notice they're treating it as there's no way you could possibly make this a valid test, but in fact, I can. This is something that people do with science all the time. They raise these ad hoc saves and they try to act like that's the end of the story. Science is just way more powerful than that. Your ad hoc save is probably testable and probably has testable consequences. It's just a matter of you taking it seriously as a scientific theory. If you really stop and think it through, you can probably test your ad hoc save, or if you can't today, you probably can in the future. This is really what Popper was getting at. It's not that hard to test this ad hoc save that they're suggesting. Now, maybe at this point, somebody then says, you know what, I don't like your test.

[01:22:25]  Bruce: I think your test is problematic because I think maybe after the fact, people are going to say, “I tried—you know, I didn't try.” They already know they didn't do well on the test, so now they're going to just claim they didn't try. Now, there's a couple of things we could do to try to deal with that problem. One of them is we could try it this person's way. Maybe we find that even in this case where we're giving people the maximum amount of chance to claim they didn't try, including knowing what their result was, maybe we find that that still doesn't explain the differences in IQ. That's a statistically testable thing, right?

[01:23:02]  Peter: It seems to me that proponents of IQ or G-theory or whatever would probably push back and say that our statistical methods are just so sophisticated that we've accounted for all this.

[01:23:16]  Bruce: You would want them to explain how they accounted for it. You want to see if you explain this… [Wording unclear.]

[01:23:20]  Peter: They probably would have at least a decent explanation.

[01:23:22]  Bruce: My guess is they do. This is a science that's been around for a while. They're a lot smarter at this than we're giving them credit for. This is typical of scientists. But let's say we did do this experiment, and we found that actually differences in how much a person claims they tried did explain the entire differences in IQ. I don't think you would actually find that, by the way. I'd actually love to see this test done. My guess is this test has been done. I just don't know what the outcome was. So maybe we go back and we say, okay, you know what? I think what we should do is we should ask people before the test so they don't know the outcome yet, if they're going to try or not. And self-report on whether they're going to try or not, if we do it in the right setting where it's anonymous, things like that, so they don't have to worry about how people are going to perceive them, we can probably get a pretty accurate measure.

[01:24:11]  Bruce: Now, so we go back and try that, and maybe we find that that does explain differences. Or maybe we find we don't. We don't—the key point, I don't know what the outcome of the experiments would necessarily be. The point I'm trying to make is you have to treat your ad hoc saves not as ad hoc saves, but as actual scientific theories that are testable. And it's up to you to explain how to test the save. This is what they're missing. They're absolutely violating Popper's rule of no ad hoc saves when they tried to use this as a defense for their theory. Furthermore, it's testable. They may think it's not testable, but it is. It is testable. This is what actually happened with Marxism, by the way. The whole theory of communism actually is testable. And Popper brings this out, that in its original form, it made a number of predictions that didn't come true. And therefore, the original form of communism actually didn't count as a legitimate scientific theory. [“Did” or “didn’t” is unclear.] It just went into a state of being refuted.

[01:25:11]  Bruce: When that happened, the defenders of the theory started to just make all sorts of little tweaks to the theory until there was no way to test the theory anymore. That's what actually happened. They used a strategy, an immunizing strategy, to keep their testable theory from being testable. Well, that's what Brett's defenders are doing. They're taking a perfectly testable theory, and they're figuring out ways to make it untestable. That's why we're suspicious of Brett's theory. It's got nothing to do with it being a bad theory. It's how they're treating the theory that leads to the suspicion. Now, having said all that, I want to really defend their theory now at this point, because I feel like their theory, I've said so many bad things, you're really not getting to just how good this theory actually is. I've explained that my real concern isn't with their theory, it's with how they're treating their theory, it's the fact that they're using immunization strategies to keep their theory from improving. That's my concern. Remove that, and I think this is an awesome theory.

[01:26:17]  Bruce: Yeah, it's wrong in some measure, and I don't know exactly how it's wrong. I still accept that universality is a true theory. How would we go about taking their theory, taking universality and making sense of all this? Well, that's what we would probably want to do in a completely different podcast, and that was what we did do in our original podcast that I threw away. I tried to lay out how I would go about trying to solve these problems and turn this into an increasingly testable theory that solves the same problems that they're trying to solve. And I really believe it can be done. Even if I don't know exactly how to do it today, I really believe that this set of theories, starting with universality and even including Brett's theory of that we're measuring the wrong things with IQ, right? I don't think anybody really claims IQ is measuring something really super specific, right? I mean, I almost want to say that IQ theory has no problem with Brett's theory, even agrees with Brett's theory to some degree.

[01:27:16]  Bruce: IQ theory doesn't exclude the possibility that interest is the defining factor that makes a difference. It just simply doesn't know at this point. It's lack of explanatory power. It could take the concept of IQ. I mean, imagine if we took Brett's theory seriously and we said, maybe we can explain a great deal of IQ differences just based on differences in what people value. How would you go about testing that? What are the testable consequences of trying to look at it in that way? There are going to be some. This isn't a metaphysical theory. It's a scientific theory, and you got to treat it like that. I suspect you'd start to find that there actually are cases where interest is the thing that matters. Certain people have maybe even their interest tuned upwards, where all sorts of things are interesting to them. They end up pulling in lots of knowledge compared to the average person. Maybe that's even what a high IQ person is in a lot of cases. Maybe genetics affects interests.

[01:28:18]  Bruce: We've got evidence that it does, at least in some cases. What if we were to find that the connection between genetics and IQ was Brett's theory? That certain people have genetic predisposition to just find everything interesting. They end up learning just tons of stuff and connecting it together in interesting ways and forming this software layer that's just superior to other people's software layer. It's got nothing to do with hardware anymore.

[01:28:45]  Peter: Well, you know, I brought up teaching math, teaching fractions to individuals who have seemed to have a lot of difficulty getting their mind around it earlier. But, you know, I've also had the experience many times of teaching something like math to someone who is curious and has a good attitude about it and looks at it as a puzzle to solve. And then someone else who might be just as smart on some fundamental level, but they just want to get get it over with and move on to something else. And they're just just not interested in it. And the results are quite different. We’ll say…

[01:29:22]  Bruce: Right. Right. So and this is and this is where I'm trying to go with this. I actually think what we're going to find is that there's multiple factors that Brett's theory represents the single most important factor that interest and time is the single most important factor. In other words, I'm largely agreeing with Brett's theory to the point where I think it's I think it's mostly right. But it's clear that there's other things going on. Now we talked about what the other factors might be. From computational theory, the fact that a person has less working memory may affect their interests. So it may be that there is a connection there. Since that's allowed to be a type of difference in capacity, then under computational theory, it should also apply to universal explainership. So memory could play a factor, and that could be a hardware difference in that case. Or it could be a software difference.

[01:30:17]  Bruce: Your software's set up to have less working memory. I don't know what you would be [wording unclear]. We'd want to test between those two theories. It could be that it's a matter of speed. I've got no reason to believe some brains aren't faster than others. And if you happen to have a faster brain, maybe you do find more things interesting. And maybe that's the connection between hardware and Brett's theory. You can see how what I'm doing here is I'm taking both theories seriously as science now. And by taking the problems that we're raising with Brett's theory, we can actually integrate Brett's theory into a better theory that is still consistent with universality, but that addresses these current existing problems without actually throwing the entire theory out. I don't think it's going to turn out to be that hard, right? I mean, obviously there's a lot with neuroscience we got to learn, but I think there's a lot of progress we could make now just by taking Brett's theory seriously as a scientific theory and taking IQ seriously as a scientific theory and trying to figure out how the two connect, how they differ, what are the critical tests between them, and no longer treat it as a political kind of dogma. Really take it seriously as, this is a scientific theory that can be refuted, and if it's wrong, then we want to refute it, and we want whatever the correct theory is.

[01:31:35]  Bruce: And we could almost immediately, we could take Brett's theory and turn it into something much stronger than what it currently is, just by taking that attitude towards it. One of the things I mentioned was just pain. The fact that I was in pain when I had kidney stones, yeah, I'm going to learn slower. Of course I am. That's because attention matters to learning and how much knowledge you take in. The fact that some people have ADHD, you know, often they're quite intelligent, right? They just have a disadvantage in the current way we try to go about educating kids. Once we have better education techniques, we may find that a lot of those people end up being smarter than their peers, right?

[01:32:21]  Peter: In the classroom day after day, hour after hour, it might just not be for everyone.

[01:32:25]  Bruce: And this is why I think ultimately what we're going to find is that both IQ theory and Brett's theory can be merged into a single better theory. That both theories are wrong and problematic in some ways and that both are right in some ways. And what we really want is we want to try to figure out what the real theory is. It may not end up giving the moral consequences they were hoping for. And I think that's the problem that exists right now. Being able to declare, oh, you're just making a category error. That's probably not true. It probably is that at least within a certain state of culture that exists, that certain people have advantages over others and that there actually are faster learners in those cases. But if that's the case, I don't want things to stay that way, right? The moral error there isn't that we're making a category error. It's that we want to figure out why do we have some faster learners? Why do some people acquire knowledge faster than other people?

[01:33:25]  Bruce: And how can we compensate for that as much as is humanly possible? How can we do early interventions that will allow someone who may have developed into mentally challenged individual into somebody who really is able to take care of himself? My guess is that universality allows us to do that at some point, once we have the right knowledge. I don't know if they'll necessarily be the same as a genius, right? There probably are some hardware differences that are going to require actual DNA interventions. But I doubt that those can make a huge difference. They might make a huge difference if we're talking about really severely mentally challenged, where something's clearly wrong with the hardware, where they may not even be a universal explainer in the first place. But if they're a universal explainer, my guess is that we can make drastic progress with everybody, even if they can never all be exactly equal. And that's what we really care about.

[01:34:16]  Bruce: It doesn't matter if everybody's exactly equal. We just want everybody to be the best they can be. And if they aren't exactly equal, then eventually they will be once we figure out how to expand beyond brains. Eventually we'll be moving to different hardware as a species or whatever.

[01:34:32]  Peter: We're on the Dyson sphere together.

[01:34:34]  Bruce: Right. Exactly. At that point, everyone will be exactly equal in terms of their intelligence. That may not be the case today, but we'll get there with the right knowledge. We'll get there. And I think this is the right attitude. It's going to have to require we throw out some of the current moral consequences that they're interested in and really got to look at what's the actual truth and what we do about that. And how can we actually make things better? And with the right theory and by taking the theory seriously as a scientific theory, we can get there. All right, off my soapbox. But that is why I actually do largely feel like I agree with Brett's theory. I've more got a problem with just the way they're immunizing it from refutation. I don't want to do that. I want to look at what are the real problems and how do we fix them? Because that's where knowledge comes from.

[01:35:25]  Bruce: The Theory of Anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience, and we'd like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we're the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutsch's philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you're enjoying this podcast, please give us a five-star rating on Apple podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player. Or you can Google The Theory of Anything podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system, and giving us a five-star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that.

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