Episode 67: Disagreements with Deutsch

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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. Today we have Mark Biros. Hey, Mark.

[00:00:15]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, how are you doing?

[00:00:17]  Bruce: Good, and Peter, of course. Hey, Peter.

[00:00:19]  Peter: Hi, guys, so nice to talk to you both.

[00:00:21]  Bruce: So a little background on this. So Mark is married to Sadia, who we've had on the show. I know at one point I referred to Mark and Sadia as the first couple of critical rationalism, and I met them through being on Peter's Facebook page and kind of common interests in science and in Deutsch's theories.

Now, it's kind of well known that, you know, I have this podcast. I used to have a website. I hope I'd eventually get it back, but I don't have it right now.

And it's clearly dedicated to advancing and talking about the Four Strands worldview and things like that. And yet, I'm often quite critical of people who are big names in that area, David Deutsch in particular. I often have criticized his theories on this show.

[00:01:07]  Bruce: So because of that, it's not that uncommon to have people who are attracted to aspects of David Deutsch's theories, but are put off by some aspects of his theories, to contact me and to send me messages and to say, I really don't like this, or I've got this criticism, but nobody agrees with me and things like that. Well, somewhere along the line, Mark started to Facebook me on a regular basis. And over time, we had collected a whole bunch of tweets coming from David Deutsch or from Brett Hall or anyone, somebody from that area over on Twitter.

He had contacted me with just, here's this tweet. I totally disagree or something like that. And the body of criticism has started to grow.

And I thought, said, hey, Mark, it would be kind of fun if you just came on the show and maybe offer up some of your criticisms that you've been collecting over time. And kind of how maybe your feelings about Deutsch's views, Four Strand Views, have changed over time. And so Mark said, sure, I'll come on the show.

[00:02:14]  Bruce: So what we're going to do today is I'm going to give Mark a chance to air his criticisms. And I'm going to then let kind of like, I don't necessarily know what they are. I know maybe what some of them are because they came out of that thread that Mark and I have had.

But I'm going to give Peter and I a chance. It's not a debate. It's just us talking about things that are sometimes said on Twitter that are advanced either by David Deutsch or by his fans that maybe don't sit the greatest with people.

Sometimes maybe I agree with them, but I can see why people would be concerned with them. I know many worlds that often comes up. But other times I'm not sure I do agree with them.

And so we just I don't know where we're going to go with this, but I think it'll be a fun conversation. So Mark, why don't you go ahead and anything else you want me to say about you or to introduce about you?

[00:03:10]  Mark: I guess I'll just say it if that's the case. But yeah, thanks for having me on the show. And I hope I'm a valuable person to have on the show and have some insights into it.

I would like to say though, as critical as I am of Deutsch and the surrounding critical rationalist culture, specifically the Deutsch side of things, I do still find him very influential and have a lot of positive things to say as well. So don't get me wrong that I'm going to sound like a David Deutsch troll perhaps this whole time. But I do find him to be very worth listening to what he has to say.

I did start rereading a little bit of Beginning of Infinity about a week before this podcast just to see if I could get some straight to the source stuff in that. And I do have some criticism in that. It borders on kind of pedantic in a sense.

But there are some criticism I have for that text as well. But at the same time, I was like, yeah, this is one of the best books that has to deal with philosophical and scientific issues that I have ever read in my life. And I still believe that.

[00:04:19]  Mark: So, I mean, I'm very much, I wouldn't say a Deutschian in a sense. And I've perhaps maybe strayed away from critical rationalism. I'm not going to say I'm so important that I have some new type of thing I can identify with, but I really personally do not care.

You know, I will criticize anything. And I think, I guess, so I'll just start saying one of my main criticisms I have with the critical rationalism at the at the get go is I do not see a lot of criticism of David Deutsch's ideas amongst his own community. And I understand if you are into David Deutsch's ideas, you're going to actually agree with most of them.

But certainly we cannot agree with everything, right? There has to be something that you disagree with. And I do find there to be a very, just a void of criticism or lack of criticism.

It's in the community of itself. And he certainly can't agree with everything that Hall or some of the other guys say all the time. He has to say, OK, this libertarian onslaught of stuff he just said right here is just completely inaccurate or just nonsense.

And I just don't see it. Now, I don't mind. Like, my wife's very active, and I'll criticize her.

[00:05:50]  Unidentified speaker: I'll be the first comment to criticize something that she said.

[00:05:53]  Unidentified speaker: I've noticed that.

[00:05:54]  Mark: So, and she does it to me too. And our feelings don't get hurt. We still very much love each other, you know.

[00:06:00]  Unidentified speaker: Actually, our biggest arguments in our marriage have been ones of philosophical grounds.

[00:06:06]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe I shouldn't be airing out personal grievances.

[00:06:08]  Unidentified speaker: We kind of got into it one time over Heidegger's Why is there something rather than nothing?

[00:06:15]  Mark: Metaphysics comment, you know. And like that was one of our hotbed things that we know. She would say it too.

Yeah, that's one of our biggest fights we had, you know. So that's how our marriage works.

[00:06:25]  Bruce: But, you know, I would love to see, you know, the marriage therapist reaction when you guys come in and you're having a debate over Heidegger's Why is there something other than nothing? That would be awesome.

[00:06:37]  Peter: Don't you know, Mark, what Jordan Peterson says about that, that you can never win an argument against your wife, because even when you win, you lose, right?

[00:06:49]  Mark: Perhaps. I'm not sure he's the originator of that guy. I hope that George Peterson is not a critical rationalist.

Is he part of the... Was I supposed to collect tweets from him? Because I could have a field day on that one.

So Peter, since you run the group, and I know that Bruce is pretty qualified for this one, and I know that you see criticism, but I don't really see it the way I feel I should see it within the group.

[00:07:20]  Peter: Fair enough. Well, if you look at the list of the top contributors, which I can, as the administrator, I can bring up, I would say there's a pretty good diversity of opinion. I mean, there's a guy who doesn't seem to agree with Deutsch about anything other than many worlds.

There's several people who are pretty far left. You know, and then there's Bruce and myself, too, who are not perfectly aligned with Deutsch on some issues.

[00:07:58]  Bruce: So like this podcast that Peter and I do, it has extensively criticized Deutsch's ideas, right? And I know you're familiar with that. You probably haven't heard every single episode, Mark, but I know you've listened to quite a number of episodes of this podcast.

So I'm sure you're aware that we're actually quite critical of Deutsch's ideas.

[00:08:18]  Mark: Well, there's also a big reason as to why I email you or text you about criticisms I have, because I feel like they're not going on deaf ears or going to some acolyte of the group or whatever. Obviously, I talked to my wife quite a bit. So yeah, I realize that.

So that's why you are the person I usually go to on that.

[00:08:40]  Bruce: Well, I suspect that's why you're not the only one who does that with me, right? I mean, I think that there is a group out there that differs from Deutsch on a number of things, and I'm the one who usually gets their private messages. And I think that to some degree is exactly what you're talking about, is that they don't always feel comfortable offering their criticisms because they're friends with people.

Now, you're talking about Peter's group. I actually think Peter's group does fairly okay. But like if you're out on Twitter, I think it's quite hard to find criticisms other than like for me.

I mean, there's like a small handful. And I think there's more people that have criticisms, but because they're friends with people in the group and they don't want to offend them, that they keep the criticisms to themselves. Now, that's an interesting phenomena that is happening, right?

[00:09:32]  Bruce: That there is such a strong set of opinions on certain things that the people who have differing opinions aren't so sure they can bring their opinions up, right? And that was one of the reasons why I kind of brought you on the show. I thought some of these people, I don't know that they would want to come on the show and talk about their true opinions.

I knew Mark would want to. So that was why I asked you to do it. You're vocalizing for, I think, a lot of people actually that maybe haven't felt the most comfortable coming up and offering their criticisms.

[00:10:07]  Mark: Well, hopefully that's the case. Maybe I'll get all your emails and text messages after this.

[00:10:13]  Unidentified speaker: You probably will.

[00:10:16]  Peter: I think it's somewhat rare for... I mean, Deutsch's ideas or some of the followers of him seems to me... I mostly just troll on Twitter, but they get a lot of pushback on Twitter.

But it's relatively rare for someone who probably has a deeper understanding of the assertions behind the worldview to criticize the ideas, which I think is really why it's so good to talk to you guys, because you obviously do.

[00:10:52]  Bruce: So I think you're right that they get a lot of pushback, but it's mostly from the outside. There's not a lot of internal pushback, and I think that's what Mark is talking about. And this is the thing, right?

Is from their point of view, they get tons of criticism. So they're open to criticism, and they're hearing criticism out, right? And that's true, right?

But I think Mark is really detecting something else, which is that those in the group that agree with it, they shouldn't be quite so well aligned. And I don't think they are. I just think that some of the misalignment doesn't come to the surface.

[00:11:26]  Mark: Yeah, I feel like it's become kind of cultish in a sense for some people, you know?

[00:11:33]  Unidentified speaker: You had to use the C word.

[00:11:34]  Mark: Yeah, I can't help it. But as much as I feel like critical rationalism should have like, you know, if there are commandments, thou shalt not have any authorities of knowledge, should be like number one. And it does seem to be like, well, here's the authority of knowledge, and let myself align myself with that authority of knowledge.

[00:11:54]  Unidentified speaker: And it does... Yeah, Twitter, I feel like is the worst.

[00:11:59]  Unidentified speaker: Twitter is the worst.

[00:12:00]  Unidentified speaker: Twitter is the worst, yeah.

[00:12:01]  Mark: And even there are people that follow people that are kind of, for lack of a better word, trolls or whatever, professional critics of some movement. There's people that follow political candidates that don't like them, that just criticize everything they say. There's some people like that on the Deutsch Twitter files, I guess I should say.

But yeah, I feel like Twitter is probably the worst place for that.

But yeah, so I started reading the Beginning of Infinity, and the first thing that I really have a criticism of, and I feel like this is a lot of times with Deutsch, is sometimes it's really not a matter of criticism of the content, or I guess it is the content, but it's almost a matter of degree with which he says things. And he'll say something, for instance, like, Spaceship Earth, and I'll get to that in a second. And then some of the people that follow Deutsch will interpret that as this, and they'll go even farther with it.

[00:12:57]  Mark: And then it becomes something completely outlandish, and I'm kind of like, well, wow, that can't be what we're talking about here. And then sometimes I feel like maybe I'll see Deutsch like that tweet, or give no criticism of it. And obviously he can't criticize and like or say everything.

I'm not saying he has to do that. But I just don't see it as much. But so like in Spaceship Earth Beginning of Infinity, he talks about, you know, well, I have a quote here, you know, today almost the entire capacity of Earth's life support system for humans has been provided not for us, but by us.

So even that, I really don't agree with at all in the content. So like I get what he's saying that, you know, we wear clothes and our knowledge has been able to have us to wear clothes, live in cold environments. But at the same time, the majority of life-supporting systems on this planet is the sun, which we didn't create.

And it provides all the heat for us and energy for that matter to do things. And the oxygen was not provided by us. So right from the get-go, the vast majority, the two most important things we live were not created by humans whatsoever.

[00:14:11]  Mark: You know, like maybe cyanobacteria oxygenated the atmosphere, but that's not us. You know, and that's life. You know, and that's, I think that's the biggest producer of oxygen we've had on this planet.

But even from the get-go, so like, well, that's kind of pedantic in a sense, but I feel like he doubles down on it quite a bit. And then he says like things like, but the biosphere no more provides humans with the life support system, then it provides us with radio telescopes, which I find completely just not true whatsoever. For one, we evolved from ape-like creatures on this planet, you know, with very little knowledge.

[00:14:49]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, I'm not sure when we started acquiring the knowledge, you know, because Deutsch has a tendency, instead of a spectrum, it kind of is like concrete.

[00:14:59]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, you don't have universality at all, and now you do, and bam, you're a universal explainer.

[00:15:04]  Unidentified speaker: But we evolved on this planet, and it did support life.

[00:15:08]  Mark: Like, life, as we know it, doesn't exist anywhere, and obviously it likely does. But I just don't understand how, and I know that he's trying to go against kind of the more green, radicalized, you know, spaceship Earth ideology out there, but I feel like he goes way too far with the spaceship Earth thing in his book, and I understand sort of what he's getting at. But at the same time, like, he also makes the statement that the Earth is, the moon is no more hospitable than the Earth.

And I'm just like, how can you say that in the same sentence? Like, I don't know what the word hospitable means anymore. Is hospitable mean if I give you English breakfast tea, if you come over to my house or not?

So like, I don't understand like where he's coming from with how like hospitable the Earth is and how like something like the vacuum of space could be considered just as hospitable as the Earth we live in.

[00:16:09]  Peter: I don't know. To myself, Deutsch's point there makes quite a bit of sense. I interpret him more as saying everything that takes us sort of beyond, you know, just basically just an animal existence where we're just following, you know, what's on our genetic code and living in this specific climate and this specific place, whereas we move to the entire world, more or less every climate in existence, it's all about human knowledge, right?

And, you know, that's what gives us a better life. It's not living in, quote unquote, harmony with nature. It's in using our knowledge to go beyond nature.

I don't know. That makes a lot of sense to me.

[00:17:02]  Bruce: So I don't necessarily hear you two disagreeing, right? Mark is emphasizing that a huge part of our ability to survive has nothing to do with us, that Earth is actually special in some way. And I'm hearing Peter say, well, but what Deutsch is really talking about is the use of knowledge, the fact that most of the environments we live in require knowledge, and we don't really just use, we actually had to generate that knowledge to be able to survive.

I like the example Mark used though, what was it again about the radio telescope? Can you read that again, Mark?

[00:17:41]  Mark: Sure. He says, but the biosphere no more provides humans with a life support system than it provides us radio telescopes.

[00:17:50]  Bruce: Okay, so let's take that statement. Okay, and now I have said this multiple times in the podcast. I believe very strongly in charitable reading.

Okay, but let's just take an initial reaction to that statement. My initial reaction is that Mark's right. That's a false statement.

I have to actually stop and think about how might I interpret this in a true way. And then I can come up with something and I can say, okay, what he means is this, then I agree with him, which is my tendency. I usually want to stop and think about how can I try to interpret this as a true statement.

Okay, but I can totally see why Mark would say that statement is false. And I think a straight reading of that statement, it is a false statement. Would you disagree with that, Peter?

[00:18:39]  Peter: Well, I mean, I think the most charitable reading is that it's sort of a true statement unless you interpret it very, very literally. Yeah, I guess that's my reaction.

[00:18:54]  Bruce: So in what sense is it a true statement and what sense is it a default statement [wording unclear]? Let's look at it that way.

[00:18:59]  Peter: Well, what do you think, Mark? Do you think there's any truth to it?

[00:19:06]  Mark: I think he meant it literally when he said it in the book. And I know that it is a false statement, literally. I mean, it's Paley's watch doesn't just show up on the on the heath, as he would say it, with a radio telescope.

[00:19:19]  Unidentified speaker: You know, so like, the Earth is very much a life support system.

[00:19:24]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, life originated on this planet without knowledge.

[00:19:28]  Unidentified speaker: And, you know, unless we take the, you know, and people that are slick will say, oh, wait a minute, yes, it did, because genes are knowledge.

[00:19:39]  Mark: And we can go down that thing. But like, there are two different, if I can accept that definition of genes being knowledge, but those are two very different types of knowledge we're talking about. And I understand you could maybe put them in the same, like, you know, this is definition one, this is definition two, but those are two types of knowledge.

And they definitely did not come up with the type of universal explanation, you know, universal explainer type of knowledge type of thing that Deutsch is referring to in this aspect. And I truly think he really meant that literally in that. And the problem is, like I said, is I feel like Deutschians or some people will read that and they will, and if he doesn't mean it literally, that they will take that and just run with it.

And I see stuff like that all the time. I'm just kind of like, it just astounds me. And like, look, I'm, I probably am more of a climate change guy.

[00:20:32]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, I'm not like a green radicalist or something like that.

[00:20:36]  Unidentified speaker: But at the same time, like, this earth is pretty special, man.

[00:20:41]  Unidentified speaker: And like, I don't know how we can say things that like the moon is just as hospitable as the earth is.

[00:20:49]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, for one, it should be like the degrees of knowledge that you have to attain to make a place hospitable.

[00:20:56]  Unidentified speaker: Should have some type of like barometer on like how hospitable a place is.

[00:21:03]  Unidentified speaker: Like, you need a lot more knowledge to live on the moon to make it hospitable than you do on the earth.

[00:21:09]  Mark: So there's no way I find that you can equate the hospitality of these two environments together. They're just not.

[00:21:16]  Peter: Well, you would need quite a bit of knowledge to live a lot of places on earth, too, that humans seem to thrive in. I mean, I think it's actually an incredibly profound point in a way that, you know, I mean, no one's saying we wouldn't have to be in quite a more advanced knowledge state to thrive on the moon. But it's at least theoretically possible, given the force of human knowledge.

And I think our species will get there maybe sooner than many people think.

[00:21:54]  Bruce: OK, should we move on to the next one or do you guys want to add anything else in this one? I actually feel like that was pretty good coverage of the topic.

[00:22:00]  Unidentified speaker: Well, you can move on.

[00:22:01]  Unidentified speaker: It's fine with me.

[00:22:03]  Mark: So I feel that in Beginning of Infinity, he talks about the importance of testability and predictions.

And I feel that he quite often downplays testability and prediction in science. And I get to his point that obviously we should try to explain things as much as possible. But he often has a lot of criticism about instrumentalism, specifically the Copenhagen interpretation.

And he makes it a point that in Beginning of Infinity, that prediction does not play that important of a role in science. Now, he obviously does say it plays a role, but certainly not the main role. And I'm not saying it presents the main role, but his own definition of instrumentalism in the Copenhagen interpretation is basically that it's explanationless.

And it only has predictive power. The problem I have with how he frames this one is that we progress a lot with quantum mechanics with the Copenhagen interpretation, that a lot of those people within that group thought they weren't even talking about. They considered some of these things imaginary.

[00:23:21]  Mark: And it was strictly predictive power, and it did wonders, it revolutionized our way of life. So I feel that I would much rather have an explanation of why an event happens and it doesn't happen. But if you give me a theory that is truly only predictive and it checks out as great as the Copenhagen interpretation does or just an equation of that group would do, I'm going to double down on it and say, hey, I'm going with these guys over here that have no explanation because it has done so many things.

[00:23:59]  Bruce: I think this is a really interesting criticism. Thank you for bringing it up. This is one that I've been kind of mulling over, and you've put it in really precise terms that I don't think I've been able to.

[00:24:09]  Unidentified speaker: Well, thanks.

[00:24:11]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, and I'm...

[00:24:14]  Unidentified speaker: It's funny because I like...

[00:24:17]  Mark: I've been very influenced by Deutsch, but the whole time I've read Deutsch, I have never been a many worlds person. I have been more attracted to the other things he's had to say. And I know I'm not even going to talk about the many worlds, really.

And I don't really have a favorite pet theory of quantum mechanics. I'm just kind of like... I guess it's to say I'm agnostic on it.

You know? But I feel that all the interpretations of quantum mechanics, I don't feel like have offered really much any difference on predictive power of what will happen. So I'm not really sure, like, why isn't predictive power the point, in a sense?

You know, I'm not saying it's the whole point, and I know that explanations enrich our understanding of the world. And quite often, better explanations will have more predictive power. But Copenhagen interpretation underneath his own definition of it is explanationless, and it is very, very successful.

[00:25:19]  Peter: Can I just interject a question here? Isn't the... I think one of the things that really convinced me of Many Worlds is listening to people talk about the Copenhagen interpretation who completely admitted that it doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.

Isn't that the whole point of Schrödinger's cat thought experiment? That there was something...

[00:25:46]  Mark: He brought it up himself, I believe, right?

[00:25:50]  Unidentified speaker: David Deutsch?

[00:25:51]  Unidentified speaker: No, Schrödinger brought it up.

[00:25:53]  Peter: Yeah, that was his thought experiment. But the idea was it was a reductio ad absurdum, right?

[00:26:00]  Unidentified speaker: It was supposed to be, yes.

[00:26:01]  Peter: It was supposed to indicate that there's something missing there, which is a more coherent explanation, which I think is provided by many worlds. At least, that's my understanding.

[00:26:13]  Mark: But many worlds does not add any predictive power to that, though. It just offers an explanation or therefore an interpretation. And to me, I mostly care...

I do care about that stuff. But if I wanted to be an experimentalist or an engineer, I care about predictive power quite a bit. And the engineers took the Copenhagen interpretation, and they ran away with it.

And boy, did our life change because of that. And I think that's a very positive thing.

[00:26:42]  Bruce: So I actually confronted Deutsch on this one, on Twitter. And he responded to me. So I actually said, how do you then explain the success of the Copenhagen interpretation and the fact that it did move on to do all this?

And he basically responded back, and I don't have the exact quote, because I didn't know we were going to bring this up. And I don't even know if I could have found it anyhow. But he said it had and it, that the quantum physics has an inherent nascent explanation present in it.

Now, here's the thing. I agree with him on that. I think that that is absolutely true.

But I think he's missed the point that that is always true. That there is simply no such thing as a purely predictive theory. All theories, even the one that you claim is explanationless, still has some level of explanation.

And this is something that I actually think the Deutschians get wrong. I don't know so much that Deutsch gets this wrong, but I've talked to numerous fans of David Deutsch on Twitter, and they are thoroughly confused on this point. So the example that I've used on the podcast is IQ, the idea that is IQ a legitimate explanation, and they'll say it's explanationless.

[00:27:58]  Bruce: And I'll say, no, it is not explanationless. It's low explanation. The two are not the same.

And so, I mean, like most theories have some level of explanation, right? Anything you can bring up. If I say Copenhagen and I say, well, there's a collapse of the wave function, that is an explanation.

It's not a great explanation, and it doesn't take you very far. That's true. But you can't say it's completely explanationless, right?

It's literally trying to explain what you see in terms of a wave function collapse, where there was this wave out there, it was doing things, you observe it, and it vanishes, and you end up with... And that's a completely understandable explanation, right? And one that can now be criticized.

So the idea that Copenhagen was explanationless is not strictly true. Now, again, we have to charitably interpret people. If they say it's explanationless, maybe they mean that literally, in which case they're wrong.

Or maybe they don't mean that literally. Maybe they just mean it's not a very strong explanation. It's not an explanation that takes you very far.

[00:29:12]  Bruce: It leaves more mysteries. That is true, right? Copenhagen, like the example that I've used, that I need to do a podcast episode on, and I need to really help people understand it, but it's the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb experiment.

Basically, this is what convinced me that there was probably something to many worlds, at least as far as being an explanation. So the idea is it's a real experiment that's been done. I don't think they used real bombs, but used something equivalent.

And you can create basically something that detects if the bomb is a dud or not to any arbitrary level of precision that you want. So you put a bomb in there. You don't know if the bomb's a dud or not.

It goes off if a photon hits its detector under this experiment. And so you send a photon at it, and it goes through this apparatus that has multiple paths, and you have to work out the mathematics of how it works. And if there's an interference pattern that shows up, then you know the bomb would have exploded had the photon hit the detector, because the wave function collapsed.

But if you don't have the... I actually have it backwards. If the interference pattern disappears, then you know the bomb would have blown up.

[00:30:30]  Bruce: But if there is an interference pattern, then you know that the bomb's a dud. So you can basically counterfactually determine if the bomb would have exploded, okay? Now, try to explain that with Copenhagen.

It is 100% impossible. And basically, when I actually brought this up with people who believe in Copenhagen, what they will tell me, and I actually have quotes from them, like on Quora, where I've asked this question, is, well, you can't hold it against the theory that it's not... Can't hold against a theory, an explanation it's not trying to explain.

And I'll say, yeah, I can. I can thoroughly hold against the theory that it doesn't try to explain something that it should be trying to explain. Now, many worlds has an explanation for how the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb experiment works.

It's that the bomb exploded in another world, and then that world then decoheres from our world, the one that we're in. Sometimes it explodes in our world, okay? There's like a certain percentage chance that it explodes.

[00:31:30]  Bruce: But it explodes in the other world, and then that is what causes the wavefunction collapse in our world, and then we can detect it. So that would be an example of how many worlds is the only explanation for something that is completely predictable through quantum physics, which is why David Deutsch advances it as the explanation of quantum physics. Here's the thing, though.

Many worlds doesn't explain everything. Like, for example, many worlds does not explain the Born Rule. Okay, and this is one that often gets brought up against many worlds.

They'll say, well, many worlds can't explain the Born Rule. And they're right, it can't. But Copenhagen can't either.

So in this case, it's not like Copenhagen explains the Born Rule, but can't explain the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb experiment. Copenhagen can't explain either. And so I think this is the sense in which many worlds is kind of the only explanation we have for certain aspects of quantum physics.

But it doesn't explain everything. And right now, Mark is right, it doesn't make any new predictions. It does make new predictions.

[00:32:34]  Bruce: Just inevitably, a wave function collapse isn't going to behave the same way as many worlds. Now, we don't know how to make the net [wording unclear]. We don't have the knowledge necessary to do the experiments.

Deutsch famously explained how to build a, if we knew how to build an AGI on a quantum computer, we could use it. There's other things that could be done from what I understand, but we don't actually have the technology to test between the theories as of this point in time, right? So this is one that I've got mixed feelings on, because I can understand why scientists are very skeptical of many worlds, since right now it's only an explanation.

It doesn't make any predictions that we can actually test as of today. And back on episode, the cooperation episode, episode 61, I actually argued that scientists weren't entirely wrong to be skeptical of many worlds. And because it would be normal for them to want to actually test, does this other world exist, right?

[00:33:34]  Bruce: On the other hand, I would love to see a scientist try to explain the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb experiment, like seriously try to offer an explanation of it without referencing many worlds. I don't think it can be done, right? So I think we're in a weird state with quantum physics, where I wouldn't say Copenhagen is explanationless.

That's where I would differ from Deutsch, although I'm not sure he literally means it, right? But I think Copenhagen does offer an explanation, and I think that's why it got us as far as it did. But we're now kind of at the point where it doesn't offer explanations of some things, and there's one competitor on the table that takes us further.

And there aren't really alternatives. Like, I haven't looked into quantum Darwinism, so I don't know about that one, but I have looked into Bohm. And Bohm's a disaster when it tries to explain things like this, right?

I mean, it can't. What it does is it tries to explain things that didn't need an explanation, which is why it's like worse. Like, it's the worst of all possible worlds from what I can figure out.

[00:34:37]  Bruce: Again, I'm saying things that I probably in no way qualified to say. What I really need to do is I need to do an episode where I actually show you that I'm right by giving you the actual mathematics. And they're not that hard.

[00:34:49]  Peter: I just hope this doesn't take us on a tangent. But as I understand it, Deutsch originally proposed the idea of a quantum computer to test many worlds.

[00:35:03]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:35:04]  Peter: He didn't know that it was going to start this ball rolling, and people were going to actually make these computers, at least as I understand it. But what you said is that the existence of an AGI running on a quantum computer would provide evidence for many worlds. I guess I'm not quite understanding why that would provide evidence for many worlds, more than just the fact that the quantum computer exists.

[00:35:31]  Mark: He's recently tweeted about that. Yeah, he did. Your Facebook group on the many worlds, I think, I can't say his name right, like Henry, or H-E-R-N-E [name uncertain].

I think he gave an explanation for it, but something about how the AGI will experience the, quote unquote, entanglement or the branching of the multiverse, and for one instance, experience both worlds at one time, and then collapse or something like that, and so only one. I went through it, and I'm just not sure I really agree with that, or maybe I don't understand it, but that didn't really sit.

[00:36:15]  Peter: So the AGI could come back and tell us, oh, look, this is what's going on. It would be like the inter or multidimensional TV from Rick and Morty or something, and tell us what's happening in all these other worlds.

[00:36:31]  Bruce: It's actually more, so I don't have it off the top of my head. If I was going to go over this, I'd have to go over the experiment in detail. But I do have some knowledge of how quantum computation works because I went through a textbook on the subject.

And from what I understand, what Deutsch is saying is reasonable. If you actually had an AGI running on a quantum computer, it would have to be able to experience things, right? And so it would be able to report back different things.

So if I recall, the experiment was that it would, because of just the mathematics and the physics of how a quantum computer works, if it was many worlds, then it would report one way. But if it was a wave function collapse, it would report a different way. So it would come back and it would be able to say, yes, such and such happened, but I don't have the information as to what the answer was.

[00:37:26]  Bruce: And I can't remember exactly how it works out, but it actually works out that the two theories make a different prediction. So it requires knowledge of AGI to be able to run the experiment because of the way the experiment was set up. But it's not an unreasonable experiment.

It's an actual experiment that would be an example of how Copenhagen and many worlds do in fact make different predictions.

[00:37:51]  Peter: Well, that clears that up for me.

[00:37:53]  Mark: I was kind of wondering. You could do a whole podcast on that because even in my head, I have all kinds of things to say about that that would sidetrack us, I would think.

[00:38:01]  Bruce: Yeah. And you know what? I don't know it well enough off the top of my head.

I would want to actually sit down, go through it. My initial impression was just based on my knowledge of how quantum computation works, is that there was nothing unreasonable about this proposal, but I didn't work out how it actually works.

[00:38:18]  Mark: I mean, you'd have to have a pretty good theory of consciousness to be able to know if AGI is there, and you have to trust what it tells you, what it experienced, and all kinds of things like that. You would have to take for granted.

[00:38:30]  Bruce: So this is going to sound weird, but I'm fairly certain that this isn't an uncommon way that they talk about things. It seems like when I was studying Bohm, they did something really similar, where they worked out what the experience would be of an AGI. I've seen this.

I think this is a thought experiment that's been around inside of quantum physics anyhow, and that David Deutsch was exploiting it for many worlds.

[00:38:54]  Mark: So we're tying this into the testability and prediction thing. And you talked about how everything has some type of explanation to it, and I tend to agree with that. And so well, then you agree with Deutsch, but Deutsch doesn't seem to agree with that.

He seems to have a hard line between explanation and no explanation. Because I've talked to instrumentalists or Copenhagen guys, they say, well, [unclear: class of wave function] is an explanation. And I'm like, well, I guess it's one, it's not one I'd prefer.

But all theories kind of have a part where, okay, yeah, I can't explain where this comes from. I don't expect many worlds to explain where the universal wave function originated from or something like that. Oh, I gotcha.

[00:39:42]  Unidentified speaker: You can't explain that. Your theory is explanationless, you know? So there always seems to be some catchier thing.

[00:39:48]  Mark: You can't explain this or your theory is, you know, not all the way true or something.

[00:39:53]  Bruce: I think a more accurate statement would be that many worlds is a deeper explanation than Copenhagen. And that way we're not declaring it a non-explanation, which then is not literally true. But I think it's absolutely a deeper explanation of quantum physics.

It literally answers, like you think about a lot of the mysteries of quantum physics that people almost treat almost sacredly or like magic, you know, that get picked up by new age crystal people or something like that. Many worlds literally answers like 90% of the things that they try to exploit, right? It explains what that quantum physics is actually a local phenomenon.

It explains how that can be, and yet it can seem like it's not. It offers explanations, like I said, of the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb experiment. It explains numerous, numerous mysteries of quantum physics, and it demystifies it.

Not all the way, not all the way, I'll admit that, but it goes so much further than the other explanations that are available. And so I don't think there's any significant doubt that many worlds is the deepest explanation of quantum physics that we currently have on the table. But I agree with you that you cannot literally call Copenhagen merely prediction and explanationless.

[00:41:13]  Bruce: I just don't think that's true. By the way, if it were true, you wouldn't be able to test between them, like David Deutsch is proposing. How would you be able to do that if it doesn't have an explanation behind it?

[00:41:24]  Mark: And I guess if all of your equations you just say are predictive only, whether you use Heisenberg matrices or a Schrodinger equation, so this is just a meaningless equation, but it predicts all these things. I guess you could probably frame it in that way and maybe make your argument, I suppose. But the problem I have with the explanation that many worlds gives, and one reason why I won't subscribe to it as much is then it lacks the observation evidence that I [unclear: would/wouldn’t] like to have.

For instance, it will explain if the bomb went off or not, but I don't ever see the bomb. You know, I have no evidence of this at all. And I feel like as much as he seems, especially the Deutsch community, I feel like, does not give enough credence to the importance of testability and predictability in science.

They really downplay observation. And I'm not sure if this is just a coping mechanism that many worlds people have that observation is not as important in science as you think. But I think it's very important and one of the most important things.

[00:42:31]  Mark: You know, and I'm not going to say what's more important than the other, but I think we need all of these things together. It's not like one thing is more important than the other. We need everything.

And I understand because then they'll frame, well, everything's theory-laden, and so therefore observations don't matter because there's a theory behind it. But it's kind of like a chicken or an egg thing. Like, well, we didn't just become born with theories, unless you're going to say that, you know, my instinct to suckle from a breast is a theory.

[00:42:59]  Unidentified speaker: You know, I mean, that's more of a gene knowledge thing.

[00:43:03]  Bruce: Yes, Popper says, Popper does use the term theory, yes.

[00:43:07]  Mark: But it's a genetic knowledge thing, and not something that comes from our brain, in a sense.

[00:43:12]  Unidentified speaker: That is correct.

[00:43:15]  Bruce: That is one of the misunderstandings Deutschians have, by the way, when they talk about theory-laden. Popper's idea of a theory-laden observation included genetic theories, and had to include it, or it didn't work.

[00:43:29]  Mark: Yeah, I don't know how else it [unclear: could/couldn’t], and that's the only way I could see getting around it. Maybe that's fair, but like I said earlier in the podcast, I feel that there's a very important distinction between genetic knowledge, if we define it that way, and knowledge coming from a universal explainer. Those are completely different.

[00:43:47]  Peter: Don't you think that the baby who has the impulse, maybe the basic impulse to suck is there, but then the baby is going to forget about it pretty quickly if it doesn't go anywhere, I would think. So it is kind of a theory in a way, a testable theory.

[00:44:07]  Mark: You know, I have two nephews, I have four nephews and nieces, and I guess I have two nephews and two nieces, besides the point. I have always been fascinated by how these beings create knowledge, you know, like what happens in their brains, like that they all of a sudden can even start to talk. And quite often when I think about these problems, I think about a newborn, and I don't feel like they are born with any theories of how the world operates, and then somehow they seem to make it work, and before you know it, they are walking around, they are talking to you.

I have been completely fascinated by that my entire life, and I have never seen anyone give a great explanation of how that light bulb really ignites in somebody. I really don't expect anybody to.

[00:44:58]  Peter: It's one of the most interesting things I've seen in this world, watching that process, when they start talking and interacting with the world, it's like a miracle.

[00:45:08]  Mark: Yeah, and so, you know, and they will say, and Deutsch will say, our observations tell us nothing about the world. And I understand what he's saying in that. And quite often, I don't know where these inductivists live that say that you observe something and it tells you what the theory is.

And I guess these people exist. I have never really seen it explicitly said too much. And I feel like there's a lot of characterization of the logical positivist movement by Deutsch that is maybe not completely wrong, but not completely right as well.

And a lot of those logical positivist guys somewhat agree with Popper's criticism and change their ways. I mean, some of his advisors were the main guys of that group. And he was very influenced by them as well, too.

I mean, he kind of took logical positivism and turned it around in a sense. That's why some people consider him part of that family. I think he's part of the family, and he's a little different.

[00:46:09]  Unidentified speaker: But I'm not going to sit there and call him a logical positivist.

[00:46:11]  Unidentified speaker: And I'm not sure that's that important.

[00:46:13]  Unidentified speaker: But to me, like, so Herschel discovered infrared light.

[00:46:21]  Mark: And he was doing an experiment. He was figuring out how the different wavelengths of light would have different temperature readings or something like that. He was doing his testing.

And he noticed that one part was reading something different than what it should have. And it was invisible. Like, you know, there was nothing there.

So, you know, as any reasonable person would think, oh, there's something wrong with my testing apparatus. You know? And then he went and tested that.

And then there wasn't. And then he realized that, okay, well, if I test something right next to the red portion where infrared would be, you know, and then go a little farther, you know, he got a different reading, you know, and it was consistent all the time. And I understand that the observation didn't tell him that, like, you know, red alert, that's infrared light.

But to act like him observing that didn't give him an idea that, hey, something exists here. We think we, you know, I wouldn't say it's self-evident. And I understand, like, you know, I'm reading too much into it in a sense, but like, I don't see how that observation doesn't tell you that, hey, there is some invisible force here that you need to investigate.

[00:47:32]  Mark: And quite frankly, it's probably related to all the spectrum of light that you're seeing. You know, so I know that observations don't tell us what the theory is, but observations really give us a good idea of what to look at. And obviously, we're a person that has explanations and we're trying to develop theories, but sometimes I feel like it's quite self-evident what these things are telling us to look for, in a sense.

You get what I'm saying? It's hard for me to word it in a way that doesn't say, well, you are telling us that observations are telling us what the theory is.

[00:48:06]  Bruce: Let me give you a really straightforward example of what I think you're saying. I often get out away from science and I use a murder mystery instead, because that's just different enough. So I come in and I see this person who's dead, and there's this knife in their back, and the butler's fingerprints are the only person's fingerprints on the knife.

In a certain sense, to try to say that that observation told you nothing, and it's theory-laden, and really you only use it to take existing theories and test between them, that's bizarre. Obviously, the first thing I think of when I see that knife in the person's back is, A, that's the murder weapon, and when I see that it's the butler's fingerprints on it, it's, this is the butler's knife, and he did it, right? And so to suggest that I only used this observation to take theories that I have and to test between them, I have to like, I can figure out a way to make it say that, but I have to twist myself in knots.

[00:49:15]  Bruce: I might as well just say, look, this observation suggested that the butler did it, right? And basically confirms that the butler did it, unless someone can show me some other explanation that I can't think of right now. You know, and so I understand exactly what you're saying, is that the way they often talk about this, they're missing just how powerful observations actually are in the actual way we use them in real life, right?

And so anyhow, before I say too much more, I actually would like Peter's take on this. I was just trying to sharpen Mark's point with the example of the knife.

[00:49:55]  Peter: Well, again, I find it, I hear what you're saying, but I find it to be quite a profound point in a way that science really is about explanation and not observation. I mean, there's enough observations in this room to, you know, to do it virtually and to progress science [wording unclear] a thousand years or a million. I mean, there's an infinite amount of knowledge that is just in any room you're in, but you have to have the right explanation to move science forward.

I think it’s an extremely profound point. I mean, it's certainly not to say that empirical theories don't matter. I mean, I don't really see that as his point, or that theories shouldn't be tested with observations, but I find it to be quite a convincing way to look at the world, the theory-laden aspect of observations.

[00:51:09]  Bruce: So, Mark, I'm not sure if you've heard... I have certain podcasts, and I've got some that are coming up that aren't published yet, too, where I've tried to talk about this a little bit. The one in particular that comes to mind is Episode 61, A Critical Rationalist's Defense of Corroboration.

[00:51:27]  Unidentified speaker: Was that recent?

[00:51:28]  Bruce: It's fairly recent, yeah. It's three ago, I guess, it looks like. And also, I would say that I had two episodes on Popper Without Refutations.

That'd be Episodes 41 and 42, where I actually no longer... I consider myself a critical rationalist. And in fact, I even consider myself a critical rationalist that learned everything from Popper, right?

But I really feel like I strongly disagree with even just the normal consensus view of what Popper was trying to say, to the point where I don't think critical rationalism is primarily about refutation, you know? At least not the way... I think it is about refutation the way Popper meant it, but I think the way people normally think of that term, it isn't.

And so that's why I actually now advocate for Popper without refutation and kind of a slightly different way, I think, more accurate way of looking at critical rationalism. I have noticed... Like, I haven't noticed this with Deutsch so much.

I feel like Deutsch often just gets things pretty right with critical rationalism. But Deutsch really, in his books, he kind of plays this point of view of observations are just a certain kind of criticism. And really, all criticisms, critical rationalism is really at its heart, accepting all criticisms.

[00:52:56]  Bruce: And I've seen that the fans of David Deutsch run with that to the point where they will downplay observations in favor of their own personal pet criticisms. And they'll say, oh, but all criticisms are valid. We shouldn't discount any criticism.

And I've had numerous ones argue this with me. And it is such a fundamental misunderstanding of Popper to the degree where I'm no longer sure they're doing critical rationalism. And I've been planning to do a podcast about that to kind of criticize what I see is the kind of folk Deutschian critical rationalism, which I think is equivalent to crypto-Bayesianism.

Like, I really don't think it's critical rationalism at all anymore. And I think it's kind of getting at the same thing that you're saying, is that you'll often hear the fans of David Deutsch kind of downplay observations to a degree to try to immunize and save their pet theories. And really no longer are seeing things the way they needed to be.

The thing that's missing here is that, just in a nutshell, I need to really strengthen this in a separate podcast. But observations are a unique kind of criticism. They're an objective criticism.

[00:54:10]  Bruce: Whereas what I've noticed is that the Twitter critical rationalists in particular, is that they really prefer subjective criticisms. They really don't like objective criticisms. They come up with ways to get rid of them.

And they want to be able to declare this theory the best theory based on their own kind of gut feel over how they feel about a subjective criticism. And I do think that that has kind of taken hold in that culture. And I think it's bad.

I think it's something that's going to need to be corrected. And really, I don't think Popper was wrong about this. And I don't think that Deutsch was wrong about this.

But I do think that the way Deutsch worded things did lend itself to this kind of anti-critical rationalist stance that captures the language of critical rationalism without the spirit of critical rationalism. And I think this is tied to what you're talking about, Mark, where they often do kind of just like when you start to talk about, well, we need an empirical theory, they'll say, well, that's empiricism. Well, no, it's not.

[00:55:17]  Bruce: It's got nothing to do with empiricism. There is reasons why science prefers empirical theories over non-empirical theories. It's because that means the theory is specific enough, and to use the Deutschian term, hard to vary enough, although I could be critical of that term, that it has gotten to the point where we can actually let nature determine between theories at this point.

And when you want to advance an alternative theory, and you haven't yet made it testable to the point where it can be experimented through a crucial test, then your theory is not ready for primetime, as far as a scientist is concerned. This has actually been my main criticism of your wife's theories, by the way, Mark, is that they haven't been turned into testable theories. That doesn't make them wrong, but it means that they're not really ready for primetime yet.

And this is really what I think Popper was trying to say. He was trying to create this demarcation between the types of theories that have reached the point where they can be empirically tested and the types of theories that haven't. And the goal is to try to get them over the line if you can.

[00:56:21]  Bruce: You can't always get them over the line. But if you can get them over the line, you need to figure out how to make your theory specific enough that it actually says something meaningful about reality and you can now test it. And then the criticisms are now objective because anyone can test it, anyone can try it, intersubjective.

He sees the objectiveness of science as coming from the intersubjective nature of tests.

[00:56:44]  Peter: I thought your airplane example before really hammered this home. The kind of theories you want to go into designing your airplane versus the kind of theories that are more like just throwing out interesting ideas.

[00:57:00]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:57:01]  Peter: Philosophical theories. There's nothing wrong with that. But they are different kinds of theories.

[00:57:06]  Unidentified speaker: They are.

[00:57:07]  Bruce: Right. And this is really what the demarcation criteria was supposed to be with Popper. It was actually trying to, in essence, say empirical theories are special.

And here's why. And that's been lost entirely with the Twitter critical rationalists. I don't get any sense that they see empirical theories as special anymore.

And whenever I have a conversation with them, they'll always say, well, my theory has got a better explanatory theory than yours. And it's like, yeah, but it makes no prediction. So it's not the right kind of explanatory theory that counts, right?

It's one that accepts all outcomes. It's one that accepts any possible set of data. It's exactly what we mean by bad explanation.

And I guess I agree with Mark if what he's really getting at is that we have gotten to the point where we are significantly downplaying the specialness of empirical theories and why observations are the gold standard for criticism. And there is no equivalent, maybe logic, maybe being a logical contradiction could be an equivalent gold standard. I could probably think of a few similar examples that aren't strictly experimental observations, but there's not many, right?

[00:58:25]  Bruce: I mean, there is a reason why science makes progress by moving everything to be an empirical theory and then tests it and tests between theories using actual experiments. And that is why science has turned into this giant output of knowledge that continually churns out stuff and we just keep getting better with it. Whereas philosophical theories that can't be tested, they all sit around forever and we debate them forever.

We still have people debating Aristotle's metaphysics, right? And who are still advocates for it. And there's just no way to ever separate the wheat from the chaff because we can't figure out how to make a theory like that get over the line into the empirical camp.

So I think, Mark, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think I actually think you're getting at something that's a completely valid criticism here. But I would put it the way I just put it. It's not that there's anything strictly wrong with criticism over observation.

It's not that observation isn't ultimately about selecting between theories, because that is going to turn out to be true once you really understand it. But I do think that observation is experimental observation is the gold standard of criticism, period, end of story.

[00:59:42]  Mark: Yeah, I don't disagree with much anything you've had to say on that at all. But yeah, I just feel that sometimes observations do really push us in a direction like you probably should look more into this situation right here. And obviously it doesn't tell us what the theory is, but I don't know what Herschel would have thought that that possible heat source would have been other than something related to the electromagnetic spectrum of light.

[01:00:08]  Unidentified speaker: And so I just, I know the theory didn't tell on that [wording unclear], but that's how powerful that observation is.

[01:00:14]  Unidentified speaker: And if anyone with a brain could possibly deduce that from that, you know, it's not like a leap.

[01:00:22]  Unidentified speaker: You know, it's not like, oh, I have a theory and I'm going to conjecture that infrared light exists.

[01:00:26]  Mark: No, it already kind of conjectured that form in a sense. I know I'm reading way too much into it, and you could easily pick apart what I just said, and I haven't formulated a way we'd describe that.

[01:00:36]  Bruce: So I think I can agree with you on this. Let me put this in a little bit different way that maybe would be more acceptable to a critical rationalist. I do think that it's not true that we always have explicit theories and that we're testing between explicit theories.

And Popper not only never says that, but he says the opposite of that. He talks about how a problem shows up, we have this observation, and it startles us. Well, we may have no specific explicit scientific theory that said you should not have that observation.

But the very fact that it's startling, this is Popper, I don't have the quote handy, but he actually said this, right? I'm not making this up. The very fact that we are startled or we're surprised or that it just isn't what we were expecting implies that we had some sort of nascent theory that just got violated.

[01:01:28]  Bruce: And that observation did just refute that nascent theory, even though it had never been turned into an explicit scientific theory, okay? And so when you understand a refutation, a Popperian refutation, the way I believe they need to be understood, which would be a violation of any sort of theory, it's a counter example, and then it really violates the collection of theories together, not any one particular theory, okay? And then it basically creates a problem.

A refutation is really a problem, not a refutation, if that makes any sense. The only thing it refutes is the giant sum total of your theories in your head or expectations in your head. That's all it refutes.

And then it's up to you to now figure out specifically what aspect of your knowledge was refuted. It makes sense that in some cases, those observations would be so good at eliminating different aspects of your theoretical system that's in your head that it would almost feel like it was just suggestive of a theory. And the example of the fingerprints on the knife.

[01:02:43]  Bruce: To try to put that into Popperian terms, in a certain sense, before you found that knife and found the fingerprints, you didn't have any particular reason to favor any one person over another. Maybe you had reasons because it had to be someone that was local. Maybe you thought it's going to have to be someone who was on the estate at the time.

But there was many different possibilities at that point. And then as soon as you see those fingerprints, a lot of those possibilities just vanish. And yes, to say, yes, it suggests it's the butler.

You know it doesn't mean absolutely it's the butler. It could be that somebody's setting the butler up or something like that. You know somewhere in the back of your mind that it's not absolute proof of this theory.

But yes, it just ruined so many theories at the same time and left one left that we might as well just use the language, the observation suggests the butler did it or this is evidence that the butler did it. And we know that's basically what it means, right? Unless someone can come up with an alternative.

[01:03:46]  Bruce: And that's why I don't get so caught up in trying to reword everything in terms of negativist language. I think positivist language is often just accurate because you're always talking about comparison of theories. And so I think that kind of fits your example with the infrared light.

Yeah, of course an observation can function against your theoretical system in your head in such a way that it's very suggestive of where you need to start conjecturing new theories. And in some sense, that observation suggested the new theory. That's even an accurate statement in my mind.

[01:04:22]  Mark: Yeah, I mean, I guess some people might point to, you know, the absolute true thing is always being something we never have, but that's always the case. So I mean, if that's the criticism of anything you had to say, then like, well, I guess knowledge is impossible, you know? And I don't believe that, but you know, that can't be the criticism, you know?

Yeah, and I do have a strange thing, too, because a lot of times, you know, we'll say that, well, our observations tell us nothing, is we conjecture something and then we go look for it. But sometimes when we create theories, we don't look for new observations. We already have observations that are needed.

You know, when Kepler went to Tycho Brahe, or I'm not exactly sure, I hear his name pronounced different all the time, as far as Tycho Brahe, I hear Tycho Brahe. Anyways, he wanted his observations. He wasn't going to conjecture anything.

[01:05:20]  Mark: He wanted all his observations so he could create some new way to discover, like, why the planets are in the positions they are. You know, I don't even know if at the time, like, Kepler's, I mean, of course, once he came up with the ellipses, you could do new things with it, but he was literally trying to fit all the observations into a theory. And I feel like there's big differences between collecting observations that you already have and then trying to get a theory to fit that versus coming up with a theory and then going out and testing that.

And I feel like in my new version of what induction and deduction possibly could be, I would say that those would be the two ways of how I would frame those two things. If I'm going to say those are meaningful at all, that would be how I would say it, where you have all of your observations and you fit a theory to fit those observations, similar to what Max Planck did with the black body problem, or like Kepler did, or you have something where, hey, I think this might exist and let's go look for it. And there's big differences in those.

[01:06:33]  Mark: And I feel like not enough credence is given to the times that people came up with really incredible theories just off all the observations they had. And obviously, once you formulate something, well, maybe if this is the case, then there must be another planet outside Uranus. Maybe Pluto is tugging on it or something like that.

And there you have it. And then you can run away with it. But you know, that's always the case with everything we deal with.

[01:07:00]  Bruce: So I actually think you bring up a good point. So there's this famous Sherlock Holmes quote about how he doesn't conjecture who did it until he's collected the observations, he's collected the evidence. Something to that effect, right?

And sometimes you'll see critical rationalists take issue with that, that that's wrong. It's not wrong. I mean, it really isn't wrong, okay?

That's what you would actually want is you would want an investigator to go into this, not with a preconceived notion of who did it, and instead try to just collect evidence and then wait until there's quite a bit of evidence and then try to figure out the theory from there. Now, does this violate critical rationalism? Not in my mind, at least not the kind of critical rationalism that I believe in.

But I do think it violates the kind of pop critical rationalism that you often find online. And so I think it's a good example from that standpoint. The truth is that we often do, I mean, like you have to make somewhat of a difference here between I made a conjecture and it's a conscious conjecture and what the brain's doing.

[01:08:09]  Bruce: I mean, the brain has to be making subconscious conjectures. So if you were to collect a bunch of observations of planets and then you're trying to figure out, you know, what's the pattern? I'm going to have no preconceived notion.

It's a circle versus an ellipse versus something else. You know, I'm just going to collect those observations. Well, that makes sense.

And then your brain is still going to have to find a pattern. The observations by themselves aren't the pattern, but your brain is going to try to find it. And so I think at some different level of knowledge making, you still have some sort of conjecture refutation or maybe that's not even the best term, variation and selection process going on.

Evolutionary epistemology process. And that is still happening, but it may be entirely subconscious. And calling that induction may not be the worst thing in the world.

I've argued that what induction really is, is critical rationalism, right? That induction was never wrong to begin with. It was critical rationalism.

[01:09:10]  Bruce: That statement probably requires a lot more explanation than I can give in this podcast. And I'm planning to eventually do a podcast where I'll talk about it more. But Popper never really claimed, strictly speaking, that he suggested that his theory could be called induction.

It was the way in which induction took place. There's a certain sense in which he proved the existence of induction rather than refuted induction. It depends on what you mean by induction.

He refuted a certain theory of induction, but he showed that the basic idea that you can reason from observations to a theory, that that actually works, and that conjecture and refutation is how it works. So from a certain viewpoint, I think that's exactly why it just makes perfect sense to go out and collect observations and not have a preconceived notion first. And I think that's actually very consistent with the way the correct view of critical rationalism works.

[01:10:12]  Peter: I have a question for Mark. Do you read Popper as more advocating for an attitude or a methodology? I think I might come down, at least how I read him as sort of a layman, obviously, is more of an attitude, advocating for a certain attitude towards life and science too, obviously, and reason, rather than, okay, you do this, then this, and this, and then you're going to make scientific progress.

[01:10:51]  Mark: Yeah, that's a good question. And I don't know, I feel like he is probably more methodology than attitude. I feel like it's better read as attitude, probably, than methodology.

And it's strange because I often hear Deutsch say, and maybe Popper said that there is no scientific method. But quite often I hear them say, first you start off with the problem. I'm like, well, hold up, if there's no scientific method, why are you telling me what the first step is?

Because it sounds like if you have to start off with something, that sounds like a method. So I've always been kind of critical of that.

[01:11:24]  Unidentified speaker: And I have always…

[01:11:26]  Unidentified speaker: Go ahead.

[01:11:27]  Bruce: Students of Popper, by the way, absolutely consider his a method, a methodological approach to science. So there's Margaret on your Facebook page. She actually said Popper did himself no favors by claiming that science wasn't a methodology.

If you actually read what Popper said about that, I think in context what he actually says is not science isn't a methodology, but that there is no mechanical method by which you can create knowledge, that instead you have to do it through the method of conjecture and refutation. And I also think that Popper is without a doubt methodological in how you go about refuting things. He says nothing about the method of conjecture.

I don't think he even believed there was a method of conjecture. It's something we understand so little that you just do it and we don't know how. But in terms of how you go about actually refuting theories, that is the method of science.

And so there is a scientific method. This is my read of Popper. There is a scientific method in terms of how you refute theories, but there is not a scientific method for how you conjecture theories.

And that's what I think he was actually saying.

[01:12:45]  Peter: And it sounds like, Mark, you see it more as a method, too, but it's just the wrong method.

[01:12:54]  Mark: Well, I don't really consider... I would say Popper reads like a method. I will kind of say there probably isn't any scientific method in a sense, but I'm not going to pretend like there aren't a lot of things we can use that will help us navigate through this process.

You know, because we talk about, oh, the problem of induction or the myth of induction. Yeah, it has problems, but the induction has problems as well. I don't throw that out with the bathwater either.

There's all kinds of problems with how we create knowledge. You can get really hardcore to metaphysical with this stuff, and you end up sitting there, you're just like, I don't believe anything anymore. But obviously, I'm talking to you guys on this Zoom call right now, using all kinds of theories that we've used, and hey, we're doing stuff, right?

And if I believe that reality is a thing, something's happening with all of our theories, we're doing something with this stuff. So obviously, we're making things work. And sometimes, I think we get too caught up with this.

[01:13:55]  Mark: I feel like some people think, if it wasn't for Karl Popper, I wouldn't know how to think. And I'm like, hold up though, man. Karl Popper didn't invent the idea of trial and error.

And quite often, I think Popper's great. I do. But quite often, I think, okay, come on, man.

[01:14:12]  Unidentified speaker: He didn't create trial and error.

[01:14:14]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if they...

[01:14:15]  Unidentified speaker: He was one of the first that really...

[01:14:17]  Mark: I want to say first, but he really formulated it well. But it's like anybody with a brain knows, hey, this is how I might be able to make this contraption. Hey, let me go see if it works.

Oh no, it didn't work. Well, it must be something wrong with it. Let me try again.

It didn't take some philosopher of science to come up with that. I mean, we've been doing trial and error since we've been apemen, for lack of better words. I feel like a lot of this stuff is interesting to talk about as far as epistemology goes.

And I believe you mentioned this in your podcast about cooperation recently, that a lot of people are saying they're doing it this way, but they're really doing that. And at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter. They're still progressing science in a way.

So I think we get hung up on all this epistemology talk, but we're all doing this stuff, and we're making things happen. Go ahead, Bruce.

[01:15:12]  Bruce: Well, so I agree with you with what you're saying. There is only one method of, I mean, like human beings have forever done things in terms of criticism, right? Criticism is not something we've invented recently.

I mean, like that'd be silly, right? You reason by conjecturing ideas and criticizing them.

[01:15:34]  Mark: Well, sometimes the criticism could be the observation, or the criticism is just like, hey, I tried to create a bike and it didn't roll down the hill. You know, you didn't need someone to tell you that. Criticism was in the test, you know, in a sense.

[01:15:48]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[01:15:49]  Mark: I feel like trial and error is almost even the better way to talk about it.

[01:15:52]  Bruce: You're right. So evolutionary epistemology is a generalization of Popper that Donald Campbell coined the term. And Karl Popper strongly endorsed the theory.

But evolutionary epistemology is variation and selection, basically. So it's the generalization of conjecture and refutation, or what we might say, conjecture and criticism could even be considered a broader form, refutation being like an experimental refutation, criticism being any kind of criticism, including experimental refutation. And then variation and selection is a generalization of that, right?

That is how people think. They can't reason in some other way. And this is one of the reasons why when people talk about, oh, the positives, the Bayesians believe in confirmation and that's impossible.

It's like, look, if it's impossible, then the Bayesians can't believe it, can they? You know, they may be using the word confirmation, but they can't literally mean it. And in fact, if you actually, this is what I was talking about at the beginning of the show before we started recording, if you actually work out the mathematics of Bayesian reasoning, it's exactly the same as variation, selection, or conjecture and criticism, right?

[01:17:09]  Bruce: I mean, you may call it the word confirmation, but it's still going to be actually a form of conjecture and refutation, because that is just the only way to do it. So from a certain point of view, it doesn't even make sense to criticize these other viewpoints as they're wrong because they believe in confirmation. You have to dig down to what they mean by the word confirmation and show them, look, what you really mean is this.

And it's because of that, I think that a lot of the debates in philosophy over epistemology are a waste. Everybody's just talking past each other, and we should just probably dig a little deeper, and we can see that there's actually quite a bit of overlap between the different theories. Don't get me wrong here.

I'm not Bayesian epistemology. I'm not in their camp. They get certain things clearly wrong that I think critical rationalism corrects.

But I don't think that they're strictly entirely at odds with each other either. I think that there's a translation you can do between them where you find out that they've actually got heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy overlap between the epistemologies. And then I think critical rationalism is the one that's more accurate of the two.

[01:18:22]  Bruce: So it's from that point of view, what did Popper invent then, right? Since everybody has forever been doing conjecture and criticism, then what is it that he brought to light? Well, that's an interesting question and probably beyond the scope of this podcast.

But I think one of the most important ones is he figured out what made empirical theory special. He figured out that there's a certain kind of criticism that's an experiment and how you use that to eliminate competing theories. And that's how you actually reason from observation to theory.

And basically through the concept of refutation, where you find problems with the theory and you eliminate them and you're left with whatever theory is left. I think that's something nobody had noticed that they were doing all along. And that was why science was special compared to philosophy.

Honestly, compared to philosophy, science is special. This is probably going to offend philosophers. But I think it's the truth anyhow that the reason why philosophy kind of forever stays mired in conversations and science keeps moving on is because science crosses that special line, where now the theory is to the point where you can actually use empirical tests on them.

[01:19:38]  Bruce: And I think that's actually what Popper discovered. He did a whole bunch of things. There's so many things Popper did, you can't really boil it down to one thing.

And I don't think it was actually the whole negativist positive divide. I don't think that was nearly as important. I think that that turned out to be an important point.

But I think that almost turned into a negative because now people are, if you're a Popperian, you react to people's language rather than to what they're saying. And I think that's a problem. And I call that the Popperian war on words, right?

Where somebody says, oh, well, there's evidence for this theory, and they'll react to that phrase, totally missing the fact that it's a correct phrase, the way it was used. The example I've used is medicine. You're trying to test if the impact of a medicine was due to the medicine or if it was just placebo effect.

Okay, and then you do this giant experiment, and then you say, oh, well, we have evidence for that the medicine works. You're only testing two theories. You've intentionally got it down to two theories.

[01:20:47]  Bruce: Having somebody react and say, oh, no, you can't say it's evidence for the medicine, which I've seen Popperians do. It's just stupid, right? Because there was only two theories.

Okay, great, call it instead. It was evidence against the theory that it didn't work. It's so awkward.

You might as well just say it's evidence for the theory, and we all know what you mean. And I do think we get this Popperian war on words where they read Popper at too surface a level, and they see it as positive versus negative language when that really wasn't what he was talking about. He was actually talking about why empirical theories are special and how this unifies all knowledge creation through evolutionary epistemology.

[01:21:31]  Unidentified speaker: At least that's my take.

[01:21:31]  Mark: Yeah, I think some of the more interesting things Popper has to say are in some of the footnotes of some of his greater texts sometimes, or at least maybe that's the part, like, hey, I don't understand what he means by this. He certainly can't mean this. And then he kind of gives an explanation for it, like, okay, there, that's what I wanted to hear.

Because sometimes he does seem like, when you read him as a naive fallibilist, in a sense, you know, and I don't, he doesn't really, he's really not that, but you kind of have to dig kind of deep sometimes to see that, or, you know, the de-markation between science and non-science theory, empirical versus non-empirical. And, you know, people want to just drag that down to you, too. And, you know, that's a little more subtle of an argument than people think.

[01:22:16]  Bruce: I agree. And I do feel like Popper sometimes does himself no service, right? I think sometimes he has picked language.

I think he usually has had reasons why he picked that language. But I think that ultimately, like the word refutation, I just, after having so many people misunderstand Popper on this point, it would be hard for me to say that I think the word refutation was a good word. I think it was a terrible word.

I think that he should not have used it, right? It's because it so much means that you can, by observation, directly, with one observation, you can refute a theory. And that never happens and it never will.

It just isn't the way things work, right? And so much of the debate around Popper is, well, that can't be true. And it's like, you know what?

He never even said it to begin with. But he did. It sounds like he said it.

You read him and it sounds like he said it. And that's why everyone's confused. So I think it was a bad choice of words.

[01:23:13]  Peter: Could we dig down on what the difference between a naive fallibilist and a fallibilist is?

[01:23:22]  Mark: Well, I guess naive fallibilist would be that one single refutation of any theory would be a complete refute. Well, tautology in a sense would disprove that theory, I guess I will say. I think that would be naive fallibilism.

And like a naive realist, I guess. You believe absolute truth or something like that.

[01:23:46]  Bruce: Could we call it a naive refutationist, maybe?

[01:23:48]  Mark: Either way you want to frame it. It's fine with me as long as the same words for the definition there.

[01:23:56]  Bruce: I think that that is how most people read Popper, is that with a single observation, you can entirely refute a theory. And I think that is just false because it's always that you refute the theory plus the background knowledge.

[01:24:10]  Mark: Well, then if all theories are all observations that are theory-laden, we have a big problem there. Because you have to use a theory to refute a theory and then refutes all the background knowledge theories, but you use all your background knowledge theory to have the theory-laden observation. There's all kinds of problems in that.

And I think Popper has a lot of stuff to say. I don't mean to endorse instrumentalism, but at the end of the day, if I can talk to you on a Zoom call with all this technology, we're doing something right. And I'm not saying it's imaginary.

I think that there's a lot of real things that are happening. But at the end of the day, I care about having Zoom calls more than I do about the reality of certain things. Obviously, this is a real conversation.

[01:25:00]  Bruce: So I have argued on my blog back when I had a blog that I am often an instrumentalist. I mean, I don't see instrumentalism as an entirely false theory any more than I see induction as an entirely false theory. I see Karl Popper's theory as having a strong instrumentalist bent even to it.

A lot of times when I want to use a theory, maybe I don't care what the reason is. I just know the theory works. And that makes sense to me.

And it's hard to believe that that isn't even a common thing that takes place. I don't see Popper as even denying that. He'll often say, well, of course, it's an instrument.

Of course, we care about prediction. And I think instead the right way to read Popper there is as subsuming these other philosophies. He explains why instrumentalism was largely true.

He explains why inductivism was largely true. He explains why positivism or logical positivism were largely true. And that's actually how I see Popper's theory.

[01:26:14]  Unidentified speaker: I feel that it's probably very important to play some really dark, brooding music in the background when you start talking about instrumentalism, because this seems the heretical section of this podcast for Deutsch people to make a joke out of it.

[01:26:29]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, I think the criticism of instrumentalism that I feel is important is that some hardcore instrumentalists will say that we can't say anything about reality.

[01:26:43]  Unidentified speaker: That the reality...

[01:26:45]  Unidentified speaker: That’s right.

[01:26:45]  Mark: I'm not sure if it's... I think it’s [unclear: bored] that the real world is made out of imaginary things. I might as well start using healing crystals if I believe that.

But yeah, I would say I might be somewhat akin to instrumentalism as far as I care. Like I said, your theory makes iPads and Zoom calls possible. I'm willing to accept it, you know, of anything [wording unclear].

[01:27:15]  Unidentified speaker: But it's not like I don't think that...

[01:27:19]  Unidentified speaker: We have theories about dinosaurs, right?

[01:27:21]  Unidentified speaker: I'm going to say that dinosaurs absolutely existed.

[01:27:27]  Mark: And here I go, well, you can't say anything is absolutely true. I know I can't say it, but I'm going to say it anyways, you know? And it's almost like Gödel with mathematics, right?

So the incompleteness theorems and all of a sudden, well, now we can't even say that 2 plus 2 equals 4. But I believe Gödel says something that we can't prove things in mathematics, but there are some things that we know that are true. And obviously, this is not something that you want people that make policy decisions to say, I just have a gut feeling that this is absolutely true.

This isn't something I want to drive home and everybody to say that. We just think they're true because of that. But I think when we're talking about Gödel, we understand what he's saying about mathematics and stuff like that.

There are certain things that we know that are true that we just can't prove. I think that we know dinosaurs existed. Obviously, I don't know if T-Rex had feathers or if it was purple or if it cared for its young.

[01:28:31]  Mark: We have some evidence for some of these types of things. But to think that large organisms lived on this planet many millions of years ago, I'm saying, yeah, that really happened. And I can't prove it, but I think both of you would agree that, yeah, these things that we can't prove, but we know that they are true.

Am I saying something controversial here? I don't think that I am. And obviously, there's no formulation of how to get that way.

And that's the problem. And I feel like Popper presented a lot of problems we have in this epistemology. But at the end of the day, Popper's epistemology doesn't solve these problems of me being able to say that dinosaurs really existed.

And sometimes, I guess, if me and Bruce sound like we're somewhat sympathetic towards instrumentalists, the thing is instrumentalists, does it work? Yeah, it does. Okay, good.

That's all we care about. And sometimes that's, unfortunately, as good as it gets, as far as Jack Nicholson said in the movie or something. I mean, yeah, I don't know.

[01:29:39]  Unidentified speaker: Sometimes I feel kind of almost, I'm going to say nihilistic, but it's just, it's horrible that we can't find absolute truth to prove it.

[01:29:48]  Mark: But I'm doing stuff and it's not like I don't think. So I guess the distinction between me and instrumentalists is I do think things are real.

And I think that's the important distinction we would have on that.

[01:30:00]  Unidentified speaker: Peter, do you want to respond to that?

[01:30:02]  Peter: Well, honestly, it sounds like we're agreeing a lot here. More than anything. So I guess that's good.

But maybe we should move on to the next criticism and we can see where it goes.

[01:30:14]  Bruce: Actually, let me just bring up something that he just said. A couple of things. First of all, I do feel like Popper's theory completely handles being able to say dinosaurs existed, right?

Because that is the sole remaining empirical theory. There just aren't any others. So I don't actually think that and we tentatively embrace that.

So I don't actually think there's any particular problem under Popper's epistemology to be able to draw conclusions. Secondly, Popper doesn't say we can't get to truth, right? Deutsch has said that a number of times, but I'm not even sure I know why that would be the case.

We absolutely can have a correct theory about whether George Washington existed or not, right? I mean, there's all sorts of theories that we can... I think when Deutsch brings this up, he usually uses physics.

And I admit, maybe we'll never have a completely true theory of physics, okay? Or maybe we will. I don't see any particular reason why we couldn't.

[01:31:13]  Bruce: Maybe that's hard to believe. But I think there's all sorts of theories out there that we can... not only we can be right or wrong about, and therefore they're true or not, they're not just misunderstandings, but I think we can even feel very confident about it, because there just isn't a good alternative theory available at this point.

So I don't actually think critical rationalism denies any of that. I think what's maybe a better example to mark is something like Okun's Law. Are you guys familiar with Okun's Law?

[01:31:44]  Unidentified speaker: No.

[01:31:45]  Bruce: So Okun's Law is an economic law that describes a relationship between a country's gross domestic product and the unemployment rate. It says that you must grow at a 4% rate for one year to achieve a 1% reduction in the rate of unemployment. From what I understand, it has no explanation, right?

It's just something that he noticed, and it's not always true, but it's often true. And people who are economists will actually use the law to make predictions, very instrumentalist, even though they don't know why the law works. And it works often enough that it makes sense to use it in this instrumentalist way.

So I do think that we do have to accept what I said before. There's really no such thing as a truly explanationless explanation. The very fact that I'm saying there is some sort of connection, that is an explanation.

It's just not a deep one. However, I think this does border on sounding very instrumentalist, right? And I would never tell you don't use this law just because it doesn't have an explanation.

[01:33:00]  Mark: Well, you get these types of examples in economic policy all the time. You know, it's one of those, you know, if I had to make a distinction between hard and soft science, my only distinction really is the amount of variables that are there. So, you know, economies, there are so many variables that affect the economy.

You can predict all you want, but, you know, if something like a little virus, you know, happens to happen in China somewhere, you know, I don't care what patterns you thought were happening. It did a lot of things to the economic well-being of a lot of countries, you know. And the problem with the economic policy theories are, too, is people take these and they believe in them.

And then, you know, if they believe that stocks are cyclical and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, it tends to follow this pattern, if enough people believe in that, they will make that pattern happen because they believe it and they trade in it, buy it and sell it in such a way that it's kind of like a self,

[01:34:05]  Unidentified speaker: what's the word I'm looking for, a self, jeez, lost for words here.

[01:34:11]  Unidentified speaker: Self-fulfilling.

[01:34:12]  Mark: Self-fulfilling, yeah, yeah, a prophecy. There you go. Thank you.

That it does happen, you know, and so it's really hard on economic policy as far as theories go on that aspect.

[01:34:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:34:26]  Mark: But yeah, I don't know. I feel like Popper, though, would say that we can never have absolute truth. So it's tricky because we talk about, you know, people say, well, we have more truth.

Well, you know, people say, well, capital T truth or small t truth or, you know,

[01:34:43]  Bruce: Popper, Popper actually does say we can have true theories.

He just says that we can't know that they're true.

[01:34:49]  Mark: So kind of in a sense of the Gödel quote I kind of referenced earlier, right? There's things in mathematics that we can't prove. It's the provability problem, I guess, is the word we're looking for.

[01:35:00]  Bruce: That's right. Deutsch seems like he disagrees with that, by the way, but I could actually find you actual quotes from Popper where he says that. In fact, in one of the interviews we did a podcast on, he actually says, there are certain theories that I think are totally correct, but I won't tell you which ones they are.

[01:35:18]  Peter: Can I, let me see if I can work through this in my mind. So Popper advocated for verisimilitude, whereas truth is something that we move closer to.

[01:35:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:35:33]  Peter: Whereas Deutsch, from what I understand, sort of criticizes that approach because it implies the existence of some absolute truth that we're moving towards. So to Deutsch, it's more about just better explanations that are moving towards infinity.

[01:35:54]  Bruce: I'm honestly not sure I could articulate Deutsch's view entirely. So I'm confused myself as to what his view is. Some of what I've talked with Sam Kuypers about this, and I've debated him kind of on your Facebook page.

If Sam Kuypers is typical of Deutsch, then I think that comes pretty close to what you just said. But I'm not actually sure if Sam is talking for himself.

[01:36:18]  Peter: Popper, did he invent the idea of verisimilitude, or at least was a primary advocate for it?

[01:36:24]  Bruce: I don't think he invented the term verisimilitude, but yeah, he's the one who introduced it into epistemology, from what I understand. So just to clarify, Deutsch does say things like, we should refer to all theories as misunderstandings, which, like, if you're talking about physics, I could probably buy that, but like the theory whether George Washington exists or not, you know, bullcrap. You're either right or you're wrong, right?

And we even know whether you're right or you're wrong, for all intents and purposes, because of the way it's only the only surviving theory left is that George Washington is a real person, right? Nobody's actually advocating for him being fictional.

[01:37:05]  Mark: Well, I mean, he can always come up with things like, well, can you prove that this is not a dream, you know, or solipsism or, you know, can you prove that you're not just some Boltzmann brain that just popped in a vacuum of space that dreamed up George Washington existing where he's really just a figment of me? You have to get really crazy for that type of stuff, you know, and like, those are all those are all criticisms, I guess, but I don't really.

[01:37:30]  Bruce: So those are all justification, though, right? No, I can't prove it. But so what?

Right. That's kind of the critical rationalist answer is no, I don't know for sure that George Washington is a real person. And I don't care.

He is a real person. That is my best theory. That's kind of the answer to those kind of out there criticisms.

[01:37:50]  Mark: I think that maybe the best criticism for the out there criticisms, if your criticism is that, you know, well, you can't say that he exists because we're just living in a simulation, that you can never really truly prove that you're ever outside of that simulation, right? So if you prove that you're in a simulation, then all of a sudden, how do I know I'm not in a simulation again the second time? You know, and it's just some type of, it's just like some turtles all the way down.

It's a turtles down all the way down death trap, you know, where it's, I guess, it's explanatory in some aspect, but you can never get out of it. You can never get out of that hole. What is it really telling you?

You know what I mean? So I don't, it's criticisms like that, even though they might be a thing, if you can never get out of that hole, I'm not really sure it's a really good criticism.

[01:38:38]  Bruce: Well, it's not empirical, right? Popper would say, you know, it doesn't even get to across the demarcation line. So there's no reason to take it any more seriously than that.

A lot of explanations get eliminated by that, right? That they're uncriticizable, they're untestable. So you just, there's just no reason to take them seriously.

I mean, sure, I guess it's possible that we're in a simulation. I'm not even ruling that possibility out, but I've got no reason to take it seriously as a theory compared to every other crazy theory that we might come up with.

[01:39:10]  Mark: And even if we were, George Washington was a very real person in a simulation.

[01:39:15]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[01:39:17]  Mark: So I mean, it's kind of like, it doesn't, maybe it refutes what you said, but not really who was real in your simulation [wording unclear]. It's not like I played the video game Elden Ring and Malenia didn't exist. She definitely does exist in that video game, even though it's a video game.

[01:39:32]  Bruce: It changes the way I might understand exists, but it's still a completely legitimate way of understanding the term exists. So, yeah. So we're kind of getting low on time.

I kind of would like to see if we could do some of the tweets that you brought up. Do you have some of those you would like to raise?

[01:39:49]  Mark: Oh, sure. The barn burner one I have, it just kind of was jaw dropping to me. Elizabeth dies, and we're ready to crown King Charles.

And Deutsch basically just tweets, I'm going to pledge my allegiance to His Majesty the King Charles III, whether he likes it or not. And I was just kind of taken aback by that. I mean, it kind of goes against everything I would think that a critical rationalist would have, especially Deutsch's views on the Brexit situation, how they should get out of the European Union with having non-elected members, like it was anti-democratic, and especially with everything he talks about with how to remove...

When he brings up the whole Popper article that he wrote in The Economist about, the important thing is not who should rule, it's how to remove bad leaders. I guess there's ways that we can maybe remove King Charles, but there's not too many of them, I don't think. But I don't think the parliament can have a vote of confidence on him or not.

But I mean, it's the non-elected leader. I'm just a leader in quotation marks, I should say. But I don't know how you pledge allegiance to something like that.

[01:41:07]  Mark: You know, unless he's only pledged allegiance because he thinks it does a lot for tourism and it helps grow the GDP of Great Britain by having the monarchy around, you know, and just for show or just for fun. But I can find no acceptable way to think that is something that we should be proud to accept, is pledging allegiance to a king.

[01:41:33]  Bruce: Let me, I'm not going to respond yet, but let me just clarify what you're saying. This is a criticism of the institution of the king, correct? That's what you're saying?

[01:41:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yep.

[01:41:47]  Bruce: What you're really wondering is, why does Deutsch have this positive view of that institution when it seems like it goes against the whole Popperian concept of error correction and authority? Right.

[01:42:02]  Mark: And what does pledging allegiance really mean in that aspect too? You know, what are you pledging allegiance to in this sense?

[01:42:09]  Peter: Well, I think his take would probably look something like, if you look back into history, that the monarchy has even recent history, I think, as that, you know, I don't know if you guys have watched The Crown or know about some of the history in there, that it's done many useful things. I see him as sort of a snarky way of making a case that tradition is valuable and perhaps, which is Popperian too, and you know, Popper defends tradition as a valuable source of knowledge. I'm not British, so I don't really have quite the same, maybe some of the same feelings about the monarchy.

So I kind of hear what you're saying too, Mark, but...

[01:43:02]  Bruce: Have you guys heard Brett Hall's defense of the monarchy on his podcast?

[01:43:07]  Unidentified speaker: I did.

[01:43:09]  Bruce: And I know Mark did because I think I sent it to Mark as one of our conversations, and we had some discussion about that. Although it was a while ago, so I don't remember entirely what Brett said, but it seems like he used an example of a monarchy. I want to say, does Australia have a monarchy?

Like, Brett's an Australian, so I'm not sure which country it was that he was referring to, but there was...

[01:43:35]  Peter: Well, they're part of the British Commonwealth, right?

[01:43:39]  Bruce: So a monarchy, there was an elected government in Australia or somewhere else, and it was known that they were... I'm doing off memory, so I'm going to be getting this wrong. It was known that they were extremists or something, and so the monarchy refused to accept them as a government, and that there was heavy criticism because this was the duly elected democratic government that was getting rejected by an institution that doesn't have a check.

And he was arguing that because the monarchy does not make laws, that this is a valuable institution that we want, that saved that country, whatever country it was. And so he was arguing in favor of the monarchy that because they aren't a legislature, they don't make laws, but they are an important tradition, counterbalance in that democracy, that this is an example of how the monarchy is actually valuable. Am I getting this right or am I like misremembering something?

[01:44:42]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's the case.

[01:44:44]  Peter: Yeah, just to clarify, Australia is the British monarchy would be the relevant monarchy to Australia. But yeah, I think that's right, that the monarchy kind of functions to provide some stability in society.

[01:45:00]  Unidentified speaker: And I think maybe that's the general argument.

[01:45:04]  Bruce: Okay, so I guess I have something positive to say about what Brett's saying and something negative to say about what Brett's saying. And I'm not even sure I have a strong, I have a defined opinion. So I would probably say that I'm a conservative.

I'm totally in favor of starting with tradition. And for countries where the monarchy is part of the tradition, I can totally see the idea that tradition may have value that we don't understand. Are you guys familiar with the idea of Chesterton's fence?

Do you know what I'm referring to?

[01:45:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:45:41]  Bruce: Okay. So it's the idea that you have a fence, you don't know why it's there.

So the leftist or the liberal comes and says, this fence serves no purpose, let's tear it down. And the conservative says, look, if you think that the fence serves no purpose, then we should not tear it down. You need to first explain to me what its purpose was, and then explain to me why it's okay to tear it down, and what we're replacing it with.

And honestly, that's the way politically I am, right? That like I'm not prepared to tear down traditions until I feel like we've done our best to really criticize the tradition, but also try to understand why the tradition is there, and replace it with something that we think is better, and then try it and see if it fails or not and roll it back. From that standpoint, I think I can agree with what Brett is saying about the monarchy, and I'm going to assume that's what Deutsch is getting at.

Obviously from one tweet, I can't tell, that when he says he's pledging allegiance, he's trying to say something positive about tradition.

[01:46:49]  Peter: Well, in a way, he was really criticizing Prince Charles, because I think the context was that Prince Charles was saying, telling people not to pledge allegiance.

[01:46:58]  Bruce: Not to pledge allegiance. You're right. But I think my natural tendency would be to read Deutsch as saying something pro-tradition there.

That yes, the monarchy serves some sort of useful purpose and pledging allegiance to the monarchy serves some sort of useful purpose. On the other hand, I can't agree with Brett that the monarchy doesn't make laws. The very fact that they cannot seat a government, whatever that example was, that's equivalent to making laws.

There's no real strong break between those. We would talk about judicial legislation, that courts should not make laws. Well, of course, courts do make laws.

That's what courts do for all intents and purposes. The idea of judicial restraint makes a great deal of sense to me where they try to do that as conservatively and as narrowly as possible. But to claim that they don't make laws is to misunderstand what courts are and what laws are.

And I guess I feel the same way about the monarchy. Of course, they make laws. They may be very limited in what kinds of laws they can make.

[01:48:09]  Bruce: But for all intents and purposes, if they don't seat a government, they have now defined a law that certain types of government, even if elected by the people, can't be installed as governments. That there's a law for all intents and purposes, that you must satisfy the monarchy, that this is a legitimate government that we're going to seat. That's exactly equivalent to making a law.

So I can't agree with Brett's explanation. I agree with the concept of protecting tradition and that it often is valuable in ways we don't understand. And I don't have an opinion on whether, in that particular case, it was valuable or it was a bad thing, since I don't even know which country it was that we're talking about or what the circumstances were.

But I guess I could be open to the possibility that it plays that role with the right set of facts. I might agree with it. But I can't agree with his explanation as to why.

[01:49:09]  Bruce: And I can see, I guess I can see, I guess I'm now talking myself into saying I at least agree with Mark that that means that you have an institution that can't be error corrected. That means that you've got an institution where you can't uninstall the leaders, even if they have super limited, narrow powers. They apparently do have powers.

So I'm not sure how to reconcile that. I think you're raising a fair point. I feel like I've argued both for and against it in my response.

And I feel stupid that I don't have anything to actually definitively say one way or the other.

[01:49:43]  Peter: Well, I say I like Chesterton's fence quite a bit. I think it's a compelling idea. And you especially look at it, how I kind of look at it as the tradition of our own country, meaning America, in that many of the founding fathers were actually quite conservative in their temperament, and they were looking closely at what worked in different states for hundreds of years.

Whereas you contrast that with the rationalists of the French Revolution, who just wanted to... You know, it just occurs to me that we've talked about this before, Mark, and you have quite strong feelings on this. But yeah, the French Revolution, where they just wanted to tear things down, and tear things down, and keep going, and it didn't turn out so well.

So I think the Chesterton's, the American Revolution is perhaps more in line with Chesterton's fence in mostly a good way.

[01:50:40]  Bruce: So just to clarify, it's Chesterton's fence, not Chesterton's fence, correct? With the T? [Pronunciation distinction unclear.]

[01:50:49]  Peter: I don't know. You're saying I was saying it wrong?

[01:50:52]  Bruce: No, no, I think you were saying it right. I think I said it wrong. I think I said Chesterton's fence, and I think you're right that it's Chesterton's fence.

You know, I just Googled it, and you were right. It is Chesterton's fence.

[01:51:07]  Peter: What do you think about that Chesterton's fence, Mark?

[01:51:13]  Mark: I don't know if I really have any... I don't really find it that valuable of an insight, to be honest with you. I don't have any, like, strong, you know, thing to say against it, I guess.

I don't... You know, it's funny because me and my wife argue about tradition quite a bit. I'm a pretty traditional guy, but I'm more of a traditional guy, like, hey, we should decorate for Christmas, or, you know, we should decorate for Halloween, you know, or I think traditions like Groundhog Day are fun.

You know, and I think my whole thing on tradition is more of a thing of what creates fun, or a type of, like, ceremonial thing, you know. It's tradition to do this at this time of year, and every year I kind of think about where I'm in in the world and this and that, and it kind of, you know, there's something important about doing something the same, but then how it makes you feel different, you know, in a sense. But as far as traditions go, like as monarchies and stuff, I don't see, because I think Deutsch's main support of that was just tradition.

[01:52:17]  Mark: I think he posted, like, the Mary Poppins or something, the tradition song over that. And I just find that a very poor way to say, oh, that's why tradition. Well, you know.

[01:52:27]  Bruce: Fiddler on the Roof, by the way.

[01:52:28]  Mark: Yeah, there you go. Sorry about that. You know, at least I'm glad I didn't say Chesterton's fence wrong.

[01:52:34]  Unidentified speaker: I said Fiddler on the Roof.

[01:52:37]  Unidentified speaker: Ouch!

[01:52:38]  Unidentified speaker: I made the Mary Poppins reference [last word unclear: song].

[01:52:41]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, that's a good correction right there.

[01:52:43]  Unidentified speaker: Very valuable correction.

[01:52:44]  Mark: But yeah, you know, there's a lot of traditions that are good and bad.

I just, my wife is kind of anti-tradition, you know, and they'll talk about the old tradition of criticism. Okay, fine, but that's almost a paradoxical tradition in a sense, you know. But other than that, I feel like tradition holds its place in fun, you know.

And there's, you know, and Deutsch talks a lot about the Enlightenment and stuff too. And like, you know, a lot of the rebelling against monarchies are very much an Enlightenment thing. I mean, why did the US create an elective governing body?

You know, it was to get away from the monarchy and stuff, you know. It's funny because the French Revolution is so interesting because, you know, obviously, the American Revolution was very, Thomas Paine was very influential with the American Revolution. He was also very influential with the French Revolution, you know.

They were, like, the American was the common sense writing that he wrote, and the French was the rights of man, you know. And it's just, it's crazy how both went at it at different ways, you know. And, you know, America had this thing, too, of being basically isolated from the rest of Europe, you know.

[01:53:58]  Mark: France, you know, was surrounded by monarchies that was putting pressure on it, you know. So there's a lot of different reasons why these things didn't work out, and that's, you know, a very long podcast to talk about that. But I just don't see that tradition being a very good reason to why we should continue doing things the way they were, you know.

I mean, you could argue a lot of very immoral practices that ended up doing some neat stuff or beneficial stuff that we shouldn't do today, you know. And I just don't see how you can really talk about the monarchy of Britain being something that we should really keep up other than for fun or something that we should pledge allegiance to. It just seems completely perverse to me.

[01:54:46]  Bruce: So let me say this. I guess I don't really understand what value the monarchy has as a tradition. Now, I don't live in a country that has a monarchy.

So clearly we've gotten along without one, right? I can understand the Chesterton's fence argument that we shouldn't just get rid of it, that it should be something that's done very carefully, not just eliminated. On the other hand, we have examples of countries that don't have monarchy, such as America, that have been very successful without it.

So we at least have a good reason to believe that you can survive without a monarchy, right? You don't need that tradition. So when I listened to Brett's defense of the monarchy, I admit that I never really came away with an understanding of what exactly the value was, right?

It was more like it's valuable. It at least once saved us from a bad government, but it wasn't really super clear how it fit as a good check and balance. I didn't see an explanation there.

[01:55:50]  Bruce: So I'm at a loss as to exactly why he was defending the monarchy. And that doesn't mean that he's wrong or even that I disagree with him, but there wasn't a clear-cut explanation that I can wrap my mind around and go, oh, that's why we need that tradition, if that makes any sense.

[01:56:08]  Mark: And they've been a constitutional monarchy for hundreds of years, and the power has been taken away from the monarchy for quite some time. So it's not like the British Enlightenment was directly influenced only by the monarchy. And Deutsch talks about the Enlightenment quite often, but there are other traditions that did some good stuff for us too, like Quakerism in America.

A lot of the really strong abolitionists were people that had a tradition that I do not subscribe to in any way, shape, or form, but they were very adamantly opposed to slavery, and they had some very religious reasons for that. And there are some Enlightenment figures that were very in favor of slavery and used reason to be in favor of slavery. There's obviously other Enlightenment people that didn't.

I know William Wilberforce is one of the more religious people in Britain that argue against slavery. But I'm not going to sit there and say that, well, Quakerism is an important tradition that we should keep having because they helped abolish slavery. I just don't see the importance of tradition at all in the way that they try to frame Popper in saying it.

[01:57:29]  Mark: My tradition is almost just literally for fun. Like I said, Groundhog Day, I feel like, is a fun tradition. It's tradition to celebrate Halloween every year or something like that.

It's a very fun thing. It's not something that I'm going to pledge allegiance to.

[01:57:45]  Peter: Well, how about something like a tradition that a child should be raised in a, I don't want to say mother and father. My point is not to say that. It has to be, and a nuclear family.

A nuclear family is the best way to raise a child rather than children just becoming sort of communally raised. Well, I think that a nuclear family makes a heck of a lot of sense. Now it might be, there are some rationalists now and in the past who might want to completely abolish that.

I think this would be a way where I would apply Chesterton's fence quite strongly and say that the nuclear family makes it, would straight up say the best environment for a child to be raised in. I mean, it doesn't mean we shouldn't question that and think about it, but is that a kind of tradition?

[01:58:53]  Mark: It is, but I think there's maybe some good explanations for why maybe a nuclear family could be presented as a good option in a sense. And I don't even mean just mother, father. It could be father, father, mother, mother, or just adopted parents or something like that.

But I feel like if you want to increase the diversity of a population, having two people or, I guess, communal, you could say three, because obviously I was raised by my family, but I was also very influenced by my brother and sisters as well, too. So I wouldn't say we were a commune, but there are other people that helped raise me that I was very influenced by. But you could increase the diversity of a population by having smaller pockets of people help raise children.

And the fact of the matter is, too, we also have these communities that we're in that also help raise our children. You go to school, you have neighbors, you learn stuff from everybody. It's just quite often your parents, you learn the most from, because you're around them a lot.

[01:59:50]  Mark: You know, and I feel like this nuclear family inside of communities is probably a pretty safe bet to have a good, diverse, but all on the same page type of community that we can work through this world together with. I feel there's some explanations there.

[02:00:08]  Bruce: By the way, next week, we're going to be talking about the Nicholas Christakis' book, Blueprint, has a whole chapter dedicated to nuclear family versus trying to raise kids communally, and why he believes that genetically, it doesn't work to do it communally. That's a very evolutionary psychology-type approach, but...

[02:00:27]  Peter: Okay, should we move on to that? Is there another tweet or criticism we can cover here?

[02:00:35]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, I can talk about other stuff, yeah.

[02:00:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I feel...

[02:00:39]  Mark: So here recently, I guess, Sabine Hossenfelder, or is that Hassenfelder, has tweeted some stuff that I actually thought was pretty interesting.

And it was her talking about, the tweet is, it's a big problem with all current democracies that members of the parliament are implicitly tasked to evaluate scientific evidence, a job that most of them are unqualified for. You know, and then Deutsch replies, who in quotation marks, should be tasked with evaluating scientific evidence? Physicists?

Question mark. So how would bad physicists and bad theories be removed? And then he says, question mark, standardized tests.

Says, good heavens, scientists are still perpetuating enough [wording unclear] as it is. Give us political power to override the ballot box? No, no, no.

But, you know, and I’m not—here I am saying [wording unclear] we should have some type of authorities of science, but at the same time, like, a lot of our political candidates are not very good at evaluating scientific evidence. And they all have advisors that do this for them. Like, I don't know what we'll be living where we don't think that we have advisors that talk about that.

[02:01:50]  Mark: And quite often, they don't even care what the scientific theory is. They're just trying to push whatever agenda they can. You know, like, you know, in the recent Republican debate, you know, no one raised their hand against being a climate change [wording unclear].

I think one of the other candidates is, or thinks that climate change is real. One of the other candidates does think that climate change is real, and think maybe address that later in there. But I mean, there's loads of scientific evidence to saying like, hey, something's definitely happening to the climate.

You know, that CO2 is likely the culprit of it, you know? I don't know, like, it seems to kind of be like, well, how can our political candidates be good at evaluating scientific ideas? You know, and I'm not saying she should have some like, what's the word, you know, truth committee, or, you know, some weird thing like that that says what's true and not true.

[02:02:47]  Unidentified speaker: Ministry of truth.

[02:02:49]  Unidentified speaker: Ministry of truth is the words I'm looking for.

[02:02:51]  Unidentified speaker: Not fiddling around the roof this time.

[02:02:54]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, like, it always comes down to, so then, and then it's funny because I sent this to Bruce, and I said, it kind of reminds me of the who should rule type of article that Popper says, and I'm mentioning it again.

[02:03:11]  Unidentified speaker: And as I type that to him and send it, I'm scrolling down and there you go.

[02:03:17]  Unidentified speaker: Brett Hall posted the who should rule thing and David Deutsch liked it, you know, and like, I get that in some aspect, but at the end of the day, like, we have to pick somebody to rule.

[02:03:28]  Unidentified speaker: And when we have to pick some evidence or some theory to go with, you know, it's not always a question about like, who should rule or who should remove theories.

[02:03:37]  Mark: You know, we got to pick them sometimes. We have to come up with policy, you know, and obviously they're not perfect. So I've never understood why that is such an important thing of the who should rule one or why we're going to pretend like, I'm not saying we have scientific authority, but not that we're going to say that, we're going to pretend that certain people aren't better at explaining certain ideas better than others.

[02:04:04]  Unidentified speaker: Or even just understand them better.

[02:04:06]  Mark: Yeah. I mean, cause I, it's funny, cause I remember it was Trudeau. Prime Minister of Canada was talking about, I believe quantum computers, and he described how they worked, and got a round of applause for him.

And I'm sitting there thinking like, well, I would hope he could at least somewhat describe how they worked since he was just briefed on, he just toured a factory or toured something about it. And then Deutsch replied in it saying, well, he didn't quite get it right. And maybe he didn't, but it's strange to hear that stuff, because, yeah, I don't know where they're coming from on that.

These people, especially when we know that they have science advisors around them, I feel that this whole pretense that anybody is just perfectly as good as any other to go through evidence. I just don't see it.

[02:05:08]  Bruce: It's kind of the question of what role does expertise actually play in epistemology?

[02:05:13]  Peter: I'm going to have to side with very limited in a way. I mean, I think that's one of the things that I really like about Deutsch and Popper is this pushback against scientists as philosopher kings that should rule us, which seems to be in some ways an extremely popular view amongst the NPR listening crowd. I actually think that the expertise, true expertise, is a very limited thing, and it does exist and should be taken into consideration.

But when you have people, a climate scientist or an epidemiologist or something, proposing policies that affect economics and people working and all this stuff, I think that's a dangerous road to go down. I really like Feynman's quote, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. What I get from that is that scientists, even or anyone else with expertise, are quite often capable of making fundamental errors in their ideas about, well, even their own field, I would say.

[02:06:32]  Peter: And certainly going outside of that field. I mean, if you're starting on ideas about, especially humans that just aren't true, whether Marxism and behaviorism are two go-to examples for me of things that even highly educated people seem to sort of accept, just their conclusions about how to live just don't work, at least not for me. So I really like the pushback that these guys provide against the scientists as philosopher king thing.

[02:07:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, so I don't completely disagree with what you're saying, Peter.

[02:07:21]  Mark: But the thing is Sabine is truly only saying that members cannot evaluate scientific evidence. She's not talking about we should have philosopher kings.

She's just talking about having scientists interpret evidence for them, other than basically some random right-wing guy saying that climate change is a Chinese hoax or something like that. And you see this a lot. We talk about evolution being one of our best theories, right?

A lot of those guys on that stage would not raise their hand if they believe that evolution did happen. And that is incredibly alarming. And it doesn't mean that everything else you say and every policy decision you make is bad if you don't believe in evolution.

[02:08:09]  Mark: But I'm very uncomfortable with you in that aspect. So yeah, I agree that we shouldn't have philosopher kings, but at the same time, though, it opens the door to having anybody say whatever they want and all these people just, oh, well, well, you know, there are no experts, you know, and I feel like content is obviously what we should be striving for. But, you know, quite often, you know, if you're a layman on something, you know, like if I go to the doctor and he tells me to do this or that, I'm going to look some things up and see if that checks out or whatever.

I'm not going to just go and have some brain surgery. You know, I'm probably going to see quite a few different doctors. And then I'm going to decide for myself what I think is the best bet with my health, you know.

[02:08:59]  Bruce: So, it's hard for me to evaluate, like, if I'm just looking at Sabine's statement, the way you're quoting her, just that one tweet, certainly that statement by itself has a charitable read that's exactly what you're saying, which makes it a somewhat reasonable statement, that there is a certain amount of deference to expertise that comes up in practical life. And takes the form of our political leaders having scientific advisors, right? On the other hand, I wrote an article for my blog criticizing something Sabine said in another article years ago.

So I sort of have this background of I know how she thinks on this subject, and I know more than what's in that tweet. And in the article that she wrote, she made the claim that scientists, that people, the public, scientists should not be trying to convince the public that climate change is real, that that's not a scientist's job, that people just need to trust the scientists because they know what they're talking about and they're experts. Well, I disagree with her on that, right?

[02:10:08]  Bruce: I think it is 100% the scientist's job to convince the public. And I get it, the public can just be stupid on this subject and are often stupid on the subject. But climate change, climate change in particular, right?

As someone who's a conservative, who accepts A, that climate change is a potential real problem and B, doesn't accept any of the solutions that have come out of the Democrats or the left on this, which try to go after economic change and sustainability and things like that. I'm not entirely against sustainability, just the ones in particular they've come up with aren't the greatest. But let me just say that.

[02:10:47]  Unidentified speaker: We’re not being against spaceship Earth. [Wording unclear.]

[02:10:50]  Bruce: Just coming from that point of view, you know, it's, I've, as a conservative, I'll raise to conservatives, hey, you know, there's like a legitimate issue here that you don't have to agree with the Democrats on how to solve, but you need to offer your solution. And your solution can be something substantially different, substantially more conservative and I think would be better. Furthermore, it's to your advantage to raise it, to say, yes, it's a legitimate concern, but what we're going to do is we're going to explore geoengineering technique or whatever, right?

Come up with what your far more cost-efficient solution is than trying to do a gigantic world cap and trade policy that tries to throw back, you know, economic progress or whatever. Okay. And every time I bring this up with conservatives, they get mad at me.

And even though I'm actually saying this is how you defeat the other side, it's good money, you know, this is one of the things where good money drives out the bad, right? If you have a good idea how to take care of climate change so that they can no longer use it to their advantage as a scare tactic. And you say, actually, all we have to do is put some ash in the air.

[02:12:02]  Bruce: And you know what, that would cause other problems, but like we're really not in danger here. And when I bring this up to conservatives, and it is so obviously the right rational conservative thing to do, to drive out the bad ideas coming out of the left on this. And I have never, never, never even once had them do anything but get mad at me and say, you're supporting Al Gore, blah, blah, blah.

Okay, so I get it. I get it at a deep level that my fellow conservatives, just like if I was a liberal, I'd be saying this about liberals instead, can just be very dense and can be very, very, very stupid. And I understand why Sabine would get upset over that and would want to set up scientists as philosopher kings.

It almost seems like a reasonable alternative to just how bad sometimes the anti-climate crowds act, okay? And she is still wrong. She is not even, it's not just that she's kind of wrong.

[02:13:06]  Bruce: She is 100% totally, totally wrong. That it is the job of the scientists to explain to the dense conservatives, this is the truth, and get it out there, and get them thinking in a different way through an explanation. And I don't see a real alternative to that.

I think any alternative you offer to that is going to be a problem.

[02:13:28]  Peter: Well, one of the things I get from critical rationalism is that we should always be, you know, this idea of finding criticisms against our best theories is something that we should all be striving to do. I mean, we, you know, we can, there are people who think that climate change is a Chinese hoax or that evolution isn't real. I'm not 100% convinced that that is a mainstream Republican position, but, you know, maybe there's some little more nuance here.

But I think a far better thing is to sort of ignore these people, you know, ignore the crazies and look for the best arguments you can against, you know, this idea that, you know, I think most people do agree that climate change is real, at least to some degree, at least the critics I listen to. But, you know, really what we're talking about is something like degrowth or how to address it. Is degrowth the best way to address climate change?

[02:14:36]  Bruce: It's really the policy we should be arguing over, right? What's the right policy given the potential problem, right? And when do we do it?

How much do we do it? I mean, like, there's totally legitimate. And the reason why this matters is because when we talk about scientists with their climate models, every climate model is going to be built off of an assumption about growth continuing as it is, which could never be a scientific assumption.

It would always be an economic assumption. Now, it's reasonable for them to do that in their models. I get that, right?

Okay, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of teasing out of the economic side of their model and the scientific side of their model. They often confuse the two as if they're one.

[02:15:21]  Peter: Yeah, but the idea that we can just pick a model and know what's going to happen in 50 or 100 years, it's just there's so many problems with that that are worth considering. I mean, it's very, very hard to predict the future.

[02:15:35]  Bruce: Well, so I would love to see Sabine and scientists who are in this space really explain what I just explained, that there's two sides to the model, that what we're really saying is, is that if we don't change things, that there's going to be a problem, but there's like many ways to change things. And we need to start talking about what the options are on the table.

[02:15:56]  Peter: And there are many bad ways to change things that could really affect, especially poor people, people living in third world countries or whatever, who need fossil fuels to improve their lives, right? It's really, you know, I mean, I think the more voices at the table in this discussion, the better, the more fierce argument on this, the better, I think.

[02:16:21]  Bruce: So let me say something in favor of Sabine, though. I guess I sort of have, but let me make it kind of concrete. This is a case where there is a large group of people that are my fellow conservatives that will not change their mind, right?

That they're not going to be reasoned with. Now, to that, let me just say, I believe in the long run, there's no such thing as a person who can't be reasoned with. I mean, there kind of is because some people are so bad that they're going to die first, right?

But in some ways, it doesn't matter. You don't have to reason with everybody. You just have to get enough people over the line.

And that is always possible, right? It's if you were to look at the way conservatives talked about climate change back when I started engaging them on this, back, I know, a few decades ago, and the way they talk about it today, there's already been a change. I mean, it's slower and stupider than I would have liked, but like it has changed, right?

[02:17:25]  Bruce: And there is a shift where Republicans and conservatives accept that climate change might be a problem, even if they're not sure they can say it publicly yet. Like we're getting there, right? It's just taking time because ultimately, the good arguments do end up winning out.

But I can see where she's coming from, that there's an almost stupidity to how long it takes sometimes because there's these... I mean, like some of the arguments that my fellow conservatives make on this subject, they're so painful, right? Like they'll suddenly say, well, I accept that there's climate change, but it's being caused by the sun.

And I'll say, look, I do not understand how that changes a thing. If the sun is causing us to go extinct, then we should probably do something about it, right?

[02:18:14]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't matter.

[02:18:16]  Bruce: Right. The level of the stupidity of the argument is so bad that I get how painful it is and where she's coming from, right? And the fact that there's an almost stuck loop in some quarters where they will just quote dumbly these arguments that don't make sense and as if they make sense, it really is painful, right?

[02:18:41]  Peter: Well, the converse to that is people on the other side refusing to look at any benefits to climate change, too. I mean, you can't say that at least in certain places, the climate, the temperature, average temperature increasing is not going to have beneficial effects. And you can see that with global greening, you know, the earth becoming more green.

[02:19:05]  Bruce: And I would raise another one. Super Freakonomics, where they raise the idea of putting ash into the air to save the world. So here we have people who are authors who clearly accept that climate change is a problem.

And they're trying to propose a cheap solution to that problem. You put a little ash in the air, it doesn't take much, and immediately the temperature of the world drops. So the world can't actually go extinct from climate change.

And this is really good news. If you actually buy that climate change is a problem, and you buy it as a scientific problem, then the fact that we can delay disaster basically indefinitely, that's something that we should know about. And it would save people, children getting scared, and the Greta Thunberg stuff, etc.

I mean, you've got this aspect that really deserves to be talked about. And what does the left do on this? Well, it's the equivalently stupid response where they'll actually try to put the people down and try to ruin their reputations, and they'll say they don't know what they're talking about.

[02:20:13]  Bruce: Then you go argue with the people on the left, which I've done, and they'll actually say things like, yeah, well, you just can't trust people who don't know what they're talking about. And it's like, look, what they're saying is, is that the temperature can be lowered and we can't be killed. Are you saying that is wrong?

And they won't respond, right? The obviousness with which the left is trying to use climate change to advance non-related goals through a scare tactic, right? It's bewildering that this is happening, that you've got two sides playing political football, and neither, neither is actually taking the problem seriously.

And it is bizarre, right? But that's exactly why we need scientists to explain things. Like, the left needs to understand why what they're doing is making a real problem worse.

The conservatives need to understand why them producing a conservative solution would kill the left, right? It would destroy the left being able to use this as a scare tactic. If the conservatives just came out and said, we're in favor of putting ash in the air, and we're going to have these goals, and if we pass this amount, then this is what we're going to do.

[02:21:24]  Unidentified speaker: And everybody suddenly feels relaxed, right?

[02:21:27]  Peter: Or not even, aside from the ash, I mean, you could just say nuclear energy, or there's a hundred common-sense solutions that would actually be much more effective than turning back the clock to the Stone Age or something like that.

[02:21:46]  Bruce: So I think this is the thing, though, is the Deutschians definitely come at it from a standpoint of the who should rule thing, right? And I've never really seen a convincing presentation from them. I've seen a good one from Deutsch.

Let me say that. I've actually seen a good one from Deutsch. But I don't in general see them explain what the role of expertise is.

And I think that that question needs a good, really strong, nuanced answer, one that gets repeated a lot, right? I'm not even sure I can give it to you. So I would like to hear it myself.

I would really like to understand the four-strands view of expertise and how it fits into things. And from this standpoint, I think I can agree with where Mark's coming from. On the one hand, I know I don't agree with Sabine's overall view.

Even if this tweet's not so bad, her overall view is bad, right? So I'm kind of glad the Deutschians are pushing back. But I wish they would push back in a way that would explain what the role of expertise is.

[02:22:50]  Bruce: And it can't be that we just ignore expertise. Like, it really can't be that, right? I mean, obviously, I think the answer is the experts need to explain things.

They need to explain things so that people can come on board. And that's the real role of expertise.

[02:23:08]  Mark: I think I have something I could add to that. I think it's like something like the best new ideas always have unanticipated benefits. So it's stupid to require people who want to do new things to enumerate the benefits beforehand.

The best you can do is choose smart people and then trust their intuitions about what's worth exploring. What is worth exploring. Now, the reason it sounds like I read that is because I did.

[02:23:33]  Unidentified speaker: And that was a tweet by Paul Graham that was retweeted by nobody else but David Deutsch.

[02:23:41]  Unidentified speaker: So if we're talking about these expertise and authorities and stuff like that, I don't know.

[02:23:50]  Unidentified speaker: It was rather because that was another one I sent to you, and I thought this is very related to this thing, and I kind of want to do them right next to each other.

[02:23:57]  Mark: So I don't know why we should just trust smart people with their intuitions about what they're exploring. So maybe we should just trust smart climate scientists with their intuitions about what's worth exploring, right? I mean, he could easily interpret that as saying that.

And it's funny because I guess I'm kind of weird because I thought what Deutsch said to Sabine was silly, and then what I thought what Deutsch tweeted here was silly. So I realize there's two sides of the coin here, and like I said, it always seems like it's a matter of degree between how I disagree with Deutsch, you know? And I guess I'm always kind of, I am kind of a centrist type of guy, you know?

[02:24:39]  Unidentified speaker: But I don't know how I could try to reinterpret that tweet I just read in a way of who should rule, right?

[02:24:48]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it's just kind of like, and I don't even agree with who should rule, but I mean, so the best new ideas have unanticipated benefits.

[02:24:56]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, fine, but okay, I'm an angel investor.

[02:24:59]  Mark: I'm going to throw $100 million into whatever new technology you're going to have. I'm just going to trust you.

[02:25:05]  Unidentified speaker: I know sometimes that does happen, you know, but there's all kinds of other games people can play with, you know, buying stock and something else so they can edge their way out of it.

[02:25:16]  Mark: But it's just kind of like, but still, I'm not putting my money on you unless you can explain to me what you intend to do with this or any type of effects. And I think for the most time, if people are really throwing real money down or going to change policy, you're going to have to explain some stuff to them, you know? I mean, I understand, like, if you're just going to work on theoretical stuff, and I think there is value in some of that, but I'm not putting a lot of money or time into something.

If you're not going to give me any explanation, I'm just supposed to trust smart people. I don't know how you can... whatever word games you can play to say, well, what Deutsch said was right with Sabine, and what he says is right here.

[02:25:59]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think you can win on that one.

[02:26:03]  Unidentified speaker: Those are very, very conflicting.

[02:26:05]  Unidentified speaker: And what I find quite often is Deutsch seems very partisan, very, very partisan.

[02:26:11]  Mark: He seems to be very critical of the left and not so critical of the right. I know he is more right-leaning, I feel like. But it seems to be the case that the right wing can say a lot of crazy stuff and he'll just kind of downplay.

He downplayed the insurrection on January 6th quite a bit, which I thought was pretty surprising and shocking to me.

[02:26:35]  Unidentified speaker: I didn't even know that.

[02:26:39]  Mark: He downplayed, like, he didn't want to call it an insurrection, and he thought that was no threat to the American democracy or something like that. America will go on. And America has gone on, sort of.

I guess we'll see how this Trump indictment goes and all that stuff. But it's definitely created some tense times. And in fact, that matter, too, is just embarrassing.

[02:27:01]  Unidentified speaker: And it's not like it wasn't a global phenomenon.

[02:27:04]  Unidentified speaker: Did Venezuela or some other government just have an insurrection?

[02:27:07]  Unidentified speaker: I think in Central America, South America, I think somewhere in Southeast Asia, there was something like that.

[02:27:15]  Mark: We had race riots in America over the summer during the pandemic, and it seemed like the rest of Europe just had to join in on us, and they did the same thing.

So, like, people really do watch us, you know?

And so I thought the January 6th incident was very alarming, shocking, and a scar amongst this country. But I don't know how I'm supposed to trust smart people with their intuitions. Who decides who's smart?

[02:27:45]  Bruce: I do have to put in here my opinion. This is similar to my concerns with the Popperian War on Words, where instead of understanding why Popper's epistemology works and what it was really trying to say, that you go after the way things are worded. So somebody says, this is evidence for a theory, and then you go, oh, they don't understand science, because evidence is really only ever used to refute a theory.

You know, something along those lines. Like there's this whole stream of things that comes out of the Twitter rats in particular, where they attack what a person said and then try to use it to remove their credibility. There are no set of words you can use that can't be misinterpreted in that way if you want to.

So it's not too hard to guess that what they're really doing is that they're finding a way to misinterpret the person when they disagree with them. And that's really where the Popperian War on Words gets you, right? You're going to end up simply calling out the people you disagree with, but then the people that you agree with, you're going to end up accepting them and just charitably interpreting them as, well, what they really meant was this.

[02:28:53]  Bruce: There really is no way to phrase things. Let me use a real life example here. So we had an episode where I criticized David Deutsch for his argument for objective beauty.

So Deutsch has this argument in Beginning of Infinity where he talks about Mozart or Beethoven, I forget which, and he is throwing away pieces of music because it just isn't what he really wants it to be, and he's error correcting until he gets to just the right piece of music that sounds the best. So Deutsch points out that this means it was hard to vary, and therefore he claims that this means that it was objective. Now, what I pointed out, though, is that there's a problem with this argument because it can be used for recipes.

[02:29:35]  Bruce: Now, I don't think anybody doubts that taste is subjective, and yet Waffle Love, the owner, he has exactly the same story. He tried recipe after recipe, and he kept trying it on on his friends and family until he finally got to just the perfect recipe, and then he knew he had the right business, and of course it then takes off, and he's very successful because he has the tastiest waffles around, which by the way, they are the tastiest waffles around. This is exactly the same argument that Deutsch uses, and yet we're using it on something that's clearly subjective.

Now, in the case of the recipes, there's an explanation for why you can error-correct towards a best version of a waffle, even though taste is ultimately subjective. And the reason why is because we have shared genes. So there's this parochial reason, right, that we have these shared genes, there's some variance, so maybe not everybody loves waffles, but a lot of people do, certainly enough to build a business around, and it's better than most other versions of waffles.

[02:30:37]  Bruce: And again, there is an objective nature to taste, but it's across the population, and it's based only on something entirely parochial, our genes and how they affect our taste. Just like Deutsch argues that there is no population that likes any kind of music, likewise, there is no population that all enjoys feces and thinks that feces taste good. But if you don't personally like waffle love, there is no objective sense in which you are wrong because it is still a purely subjective thing because it's based on something entirely parochial, which is just genes and how genes affect what we consider to taste good and what we consider to not taste good.

Now, could you use this same argument for music? Well, Steven Pinker does. He has the music is cheesecake for the ears argument that he uses.

Now, I'm not saying that argument's right. The point I was making was that Deutsch's argument didn't sufficiently differentiate between Pinker's theory and his own theory. Deutsch was in essence arguing that if it's hard to vary, that we know that it's not only objective at the level of a population, but that it's non-parochial.

[02:31:50]  Bruce: But he didn't give any argument for why it was non-parochial. It could still be parochial based on the argument that he used. You could probably add to his argument and you could probably find a way to make it a better argument and error correct it until it's a better argument and it also eliminates the Steven Pinker cheesecake for the ears argument.

And yet my point was is that there was something insufficient with his argument. Well, I had a Deutschian write to me right after that episode and he said, no, you are wrong because you're using the word insufficient and insufficiency, that implies justificationism. You're being a justificationist and therefore your argument is incorrect.

So I wrote back to him and I try to explain that while it's true that the word insufficient in some circumstances might imply some form of justificationism, that it wasn't a given that it meant that and that it wasn't in this case. It didn't mean any sort of justification in this case. I was pointing out a logical flaw with his argument.

[02:32:50]  Bruce: I even gave him an example, this Deutschian example, and I said, suppose I give you propositional logic and I say A and B imply C, then I demonstrate A to be true and then I try to draw the conclusion C. We would say you had an insufficient argument. We don't know C to be true or false.

We know A is true, but you didn't show that B was true. Therefore, we can't yet conclude that C is true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

So we would say that's an insufficient argument. Now, clearly this has nothing to do with justificationism. This is just what we mean when we're trying to explain that there was a rational flaw or a logical flaw with the argument being made.

[02:33:32]  Bruce: So after I wrote that, he wrote back to me and he said, no, you're just being a justificationist and so you're wrong. So I stopped and I thought about it and I thought, okay, he's clearly getting tripped up on the word insufficient because insufficient might in some cases imply justificationism and he's struggling to see past that. So what word can I use or phrase can I use that would help him see that this is a legitimate argument, a legitimate criticism that needs to be taken seriously that has nothing to do with justificationism.

And I thought about it and I thought about it and I realized there is no word or set of words or phrases or sentences in the English language that he can't see as justificationist that's going to express the same idea. He was making a choice, in essence, to read it as justificationist because he didn't like the argument. Now I'm sure that if I had been making a different argument, let's say I had been arguing against someone who was arguing in favor of communism and I was saying this communist, his argument is insufficient, I don't doubt that at this point suddenly the word insufficient would be just fine.

[02:34:38]  Bruce: He would understand exactly what I was trying to say, exactly what I was trying to get at. He would see that it has nothing to do with justificationism. It probably wouldn't even cross his mind to think of it as justificationist.

But because I was making an argument he didn't want to hear, he was getting tripped up on words, but there was no actual set of words I could use that he wouldn't get tripped up on under this circumstance. And I started to realize this is the problem with the Popperian war on words. It gives you an easy out.

If you have explanations being offered and the person happens to use a term that you can take as justificationist or about confirmation or empiricism or any of the things that Deutsch writes against, there are so many words that might imply those. In fact, it's literally impossible to have a conversation without using words that can't be taken in such a way if the person so chooses. So then the person doesn't have to hear the criticism because they've been able to criticize you for what words you used, and there's no set of words you can use that they can't criticize and thereby just simply dismiss your whole argument.

[02:35:42]  Bruce: In essence, this person had turned off their error correction. There was no way to express this completely valid criticism to them that they weren't going to dismiss based solely on which words I chose to use. And so I do think that this is what we're kind of getting here, is that in one case it was pro what they believed, in one case it was against what they believed, but we're not getting to the heart of the issue, okay, which is what is the role of experts?

Okay, yeah, we want people who know more to be able to experiment and to try things out. There's a certain truth to Paul Graham's tweet, right? And there's a certain truth to Sabine's tweet.

They're both getting at, and Mark, you're right, that I think as just a kind of surface read, they seem like they're at odds with each other. We need an explanation as to how to navigate between under what circumstance are we saying Sabine's wrong and Paul's right when they're kind of saying the same thing, but in different ways. And I definitely think we need a stronger understanding.

[02:36:49]  Bruce: We need to, this is one of the reasons why I'm such a strong advocate of charitable reading, right? I am prepared to, even though I know Sabine has some incorrect ideas about this, I'm prepared to at least assume that what she's really saying in this tweet is, hey, we need to trust experts more. It's hard for them to explain things to the public, which is kind of a true statement, right?

And I think in the case of the Paul Graham statement, he's saying, hey, we need to trust experts more. He's saying the same thing as Sabine when you read him charitably, right? And so that's kind of true too.

And yet it still comes down to, we don't ever want them to have the power to enforce it on us. They must convince us. And I think that is the ultimate open society answer, is that science is a means of persuasion.

[02:37:40]  Unidentified speaker: It's not an authority.

[02:37:41]  Peter: Yeah, so the point of expertise is that what an expert should do is to argue for their position and try to convince other people. And I think in this modern world, this is happening more than ever, really. And that's why I'm a complete...

I mean, this is one way that I disagree with both the right and the left, I think. I'm a complete optimist in terms of all these electronic communication and Twitter and all this. The more arguments that are out there, the better.

The more podcasts where people are arguing for their ideas, the better. And through this process, we humans will hopefully make a lot of mistakes and fallibly move closer to truth, kind of like what Deutsch advocates, or at least I hear him saying.

[02:38:36]  Bruce: Have you read John Rauch's book, The Constitution of Knowledge?

[02:38:40]  Peter: No, I should. You've recommended it to me, and I read his other one, but I feel like he's a little pessimistic, but yeah, I should read it.

[02:38:54]  Bruce: So yeah, he actually makes somewhat of an argument against the marketplace of free ideas. Although I think in the long run, he's entirely optimistic that you start off with a marketplace of free ideas, and it may not necessarily be good, but that over time we will move towards that because we understand how to build the kinds of institutions that favor truth over falseness.

[02:39:17]  Peter: I think long-term, my prediction, 100 years, 200 years, people are going to look back and say, wow, remember when people thought that social media and Twitter and all this stuff was going to tear apart our country and think, I think it will be more obvious that it was this access to information and communication was a good thing for humans. Because that's just part of it's just my ideas about what humans are. We're knowledge creators and we like truth and we want to be right, even as flawed as we are.

[02:39:53]  Bruce: We will have to do a separate podcast on John Rauch's Constitution Knowledge. Sorry, go ahead.

[02:39:59]  Mark: Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, that's why the French Revolution is so interesting because during the French Revolution, there was an explosion of like gazettes and media at that time that wrote, you know, political ideas and wrote about current events and news stories, you know, and that ended up being, you know, ended up in a bad way, you know, and there was a similar explosion in America, ended up in a good way. So a lot of times, you know, Deutsch will say, you know, we're like, you know, there's no guarantee that we won't just blow up, you know, our civilization in some way, you know, there are no guarantees that we're going to come through it. And it does seem to be the best bet is some type of open society, democratic institution to go because it does seem like more authoritative ones don't have enough corrective mechanisms in it to keep that from happening, you know.

So, yeah, I mean, it's a brave new world out there, you know, is the AGI. Because, you know, the Jacquard loom people thought that no one will ever, you know, have to work again to destroy all their jobs. The textile industry will be destroyed, you know, and that certainly wasn't the case, you know.

[02:41:17]  Mark: And now with AGI, we're talking about, you know, well, you know, no truck drivers will have a job, all of our jobs will be automated, and no one will be able to work, we won't be able to find. And they'll say that this is something different, you know. And part of me is...

[02:41:31]  Unidentified speaker: You're talking about more AI than AGI, though, right?

[02:41:34]  Mark: It could be both, really. Either or, you know, AI or AGI, for that matter, you know. Maybe on the cusp of...

We definitely have AI in some type of level right now, right? I mean, the people in the art world are tremendously scared, and I think they have reason to be scared, with the AI art generators, I see. But AGI is a whole different ball game, obviously, too, but that's even more complicated.

But yeah, part of me thinks that, yeah, that is different. Part of me thinks that we'll find ways, we'll get by, you know? I mean, I think we will find ways, you know?

[02:42:11]  Unidentified speaker: But I don't claim to be prophetic about the future.

[02:42:16]  Bruce: John Rauch in the Constitution of Knowledge, he points out that we did freak out over the printing press, right? That it's going to tear us apart. One of the things he points out is A, it did tear us apart.

Massive wars came out of the printing press. And B, we now look back on it, and the idea of the printing press is going to tear us apart is silly, right? So it's a matter of generating the knowledge on how to control it.

And it's a very Popperian view, by the way. He uses Charles Peirce more than Popper, but he's very much into Popper also. But social media is the same way.

His point of view is we can solve this problem. We will solve this problem. Social media will turn out to be all the positive and none of the negative, but we aren't there today, and we've got to figure it out.

And it's new. That's why it's carrying at us [wording unclear] right at the moment, just like the printing press tore at us. But it's a solvable problem, and we will solve it.

[02:43:19]  Bruce: And I do think that's about right. The marketplace of ideas, concept, it downplays or ignores the importance of institutions, the fact that institutions are what create the environment where books aren't dangerous anymore. And we have ways of going about this, where we understand how to do it now.

And we're going to do that with social media. We're just at an era where we're still trying to figure it out. And we're getting there.

So I'm very optimistic in that we will solve the problem, but I accept that it is a problem that needs to be solved.

[02:43:56]  Mark: Well, I guess you could say it destroyed our world in a sense, but the printing press did destroy a lot of ideas of that, and they found new and better ones. I want to say the printing press is the reason why monarchies were dissolved or why the Enlightenment happened all the way, but it certainly played a part, I imagine. So their way of life was definitely, if you want to say destroyed, you could also look at it more in a positive light, that it was improved dramatically.

I'd be interested to know how, though, more wars happened because of the printing press. As far as my understanding is, there were plenty of fighting in between tribes. I think maybe we didn't have superpowers as much as we had that could do as much destruction, but since the dawn of time, we've been killing each other right and left over silly stuff, or maybe not silly stuff as well, too.

[02:44:55]  Bruce: So maybe I don't have the statistics handy, so maybe it's wrong to say that it created more wars, but it definitely created some of the worst wars, the religious wars that followed and things like that due to the Protestant Reformation. And so I think there's a good case to be made there that the printing press was the, you know, proximate cause of a lot of that. So the fact that something has a negative effect doesn't mean it won't be in the long run a positive effect.

Sometimes you just have to work out how to deal with it. I think that actually goes for what you were talking about AI too, right? I mean, like, the fear that AI will take away all the trucker jobs, that's probably a legitimate fear, but it's not likely to ever come to fruition.

For one thing, AI, just driving, try to do automatic driving with AI, it's really a hard problem to solve. We're not probably all that close to solving it. When we do, it will only be the easiest parts.

[02:45:58]  Bruce: It'll be like on the freeway, and then you'll need probably more truck drivers to be able to do the last mile. It was what they call it, the last mile. So, I mean, like, the odds that the technology would just come into being all at once and suddenly cause a massive drop of all the jobs is not probably true.

I keep seeing, using the word probably here. Who knows, right? It could, like, it's not like technology hasn't in the history of the world destroyed somebody's life through automation.

[02:46:27]  Unidentified speaker: Of course it has.

[02:46:29]  Peter: I think the reality is it probably will destroy a lot of jobs. I mean, whether they're truck drivers or computer programmers or teachers, it's going to radically affect the way people work, at the very least. But, you know, I still think big picture.

I mean, I'm an optimist. I think it'll take away, it'll empower people more than anything and just positively change the way people work. Menial labor, like being probably in a hundred years, people look back and think, oh, people worked as cashiers and picking berries in a farm.

You know, things that, you know, they're just not good use of human labor or human minds, really. So I think it's big picture. It looks very much like a printing press.

[02:47:20]  Unidentified speaker: It will be a positive.

[02:47:23]  Bruce: I think we do have to recognize, though, that there is always a potential danger. And the very fact that people raise it as a potential danger is part of how an open society avoids the danger, right? So when somebody brings up, oh, AI is going to put all the truckers out of work, the fact that truckers won't get put out of work will in part happen because somebody raised the issue, AI is going to put truckers out of work.

It's weird how that works, right? It's kind of reflexive. So it's necessary to have the alarmists in society so that the alarm goes off so early that things don't go the way that people are worried about.

[02:48:06]  Peter: Sounds like you're almost defending our negativity bias as performing a useful function.

[02:48:11]  Unidentified speaker: I think it does, right?

[02:48:14]  Unidentified speaker: Well,

[02:48:16]  Mark: and we call them alarmists, and yeah, there are some like that, but some of them were in the field. Sam Altman recently testified about the dangers of AI, and he's the founder of ChatGPT. So it's not like the people in the field creating this don't think there are some things we have to be worried about.

Obviously, the Manhattan Project, there was a legitimate scare at one time of setting the atmosphere on fire and having some chain reaction. I think there's... People, they figured that out decently quick, that that wouldn't be the case.

But it was a legitimate scare at first. If you told me that then, I was a scientist, I would have been... I would not have been in good shape when I went back home to the house, thinking about, like, we are literally going to destroy the world by setting the atmosphere on fire and blowing up the entire planet.

But who knows? Maybe there's other things that have happened. I think Tegmark has some interesting things about that, where he talks about what he calls the red...

He has a name for certain ideas or inventions that could destroy the planet.

[02:49:32]  Unidentified speaker: Are you thinking of Bostrom and the white ball, black ball?

[02:49:37]  Peter: Vulnerable world hypothesis.

[02:49:41]  Mark: I don't really always subscribe to that. I think it's an interesting way to define a black ball, white ball thing. Some people say, well, if it's just as easy to destroy the planet with putting silica in the microwave, we'd all probably have been dead a long time ago.

But who knows? There could be technologies in the future where that might be the case. Maybe we can separate quarks, and it's going to be the worst explosion ever.

[02:50:08]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, who knows?

[02:50:10]  Unidentified speaker: But I think you are.

[02:50:13]  Unidentified speaker: How much more time do you want to go with this?

[02:50:15]  Mark: We’re pushing Lex Fridman type of podcast.

[02:50:18]  Peter: I was thinking we're coming up three hours now. Are there any more rapid fire criticisms, Mark, that you'd like to make of the Deutschian world?

[02:50:29]  Mark: I think since we've talked about possible future stuff, I think the last thing I could say to maybe sum it up is I feel like sometimes Deutsch comes off as a futurist in a way that I feel like he seems a little bit... His optimism, which I like, and it's very attractive to it, and I think a lot of the... Listen to what the scientists say obviously have a lot of bad philosophies.

I think I talked about it recently. Feeling insignificant because the universe is big is silly. And a lot of the pro-science people almost seems to want to belittle you in such a way.

And Deutsch doesn't do that. And his outlook is very optimistic, at least not saying that you aren't special. Other ones just might make you feel like you're just a whole chemical scum thing.

I think Deutsch's TED talk about the TED chemical scum is always an uplifting and great experience. It almost sets my mind right every time I listen to that one. But quite often, I feel like Deutsch is talking about future technologies or a way we should affect policy with these technologies already being a positive thing.

[02:51:44]  Mark: And I feel like sometimes he comes out as kind of prophetic on it. Like even in Beginning of Infinity, he talks about hospitable stuff and any block of the... When he talks about in between galaxies, each block so many square miles only has so many atoms.

But if we had a spaceship that could transmutate these atoms into certain things, we could find ways to do work and be able to create new things. So it's only a matter of knowledge that prevents this, which I agree. But I feel like, man, I don't know.

I feel like out in the void of the cosmos, I don't care what spaceship I got, I think I'm dead. I feel like... And I know he's kind of using that as a metaphor and maybe try to drive home his point at how transformative knowledge is.

But if you take that literally, I feel like that's a pretty rosy picture. I just feel like sometimes he just comes off as too much of a futurist in a sense that like, yeah, like maybe some of this identity culture we have now is kind of weird. And I think Deutsch somewhat, maybe you want to say subscribes to it, but transhumanism probably will be a thing.

[02:53:08]  Mark: And we will maybe be able to override our genes in such a way to where a lot of the arguments that Deutsch makes that were not affected by our genes, which I don't agree with either, and it's probably going to tailwind us off for another 30 minutes. But in the long run, he might be right in a sense that when we are fully transhumanists, and we can just change our genes at the drop of a hat, our genes won't matter as much to us anymore, and it will just be whatever we think we want. But I don't know if that technology will really happen.

Maybe 300 years from now, we still won't be able to have automated truck drivers, but we'll be able to grow horns on our head and be completely healthy. I don't know. There's a lot of technologies that people assumed we’d have back in the day that we don't.

[02:54:06]  Peter: Well, Mark, I really appreciate you coming on this podcast and bringing your criticisms here. And also, I really appreciate both you and your wife, Sadia, bringing up some criticisms on the Facebook group, too. I think we don't want an echo chamber, so that's definitely, I think we probably all agree, the wrong approach to moving closer to truth in this life, wherever you want to put it.

[02:54:39]  Bruce: Yeah, we definitely don't want an echo chamber. Sorry, I was going to say exactly what Peter said as a joke, but now I've already lost it, so cut this part of the show.

[02:54:49]  Unidentified speaker: No, no, that was good. That was good.

[02:54:54]  Unidentified speaker: You could just put some reverb effect on Peter's voice, and then slowly use AI to make it sound like Bruce at the end.

[02:55:07]  Mark: Thanks for having me. I hope people thought I had something to say, and I've always respected both of you guys. One reason why I continue talking to you guys, we both are very open and take criticism very well, and give good criticism, so it's great to meet you guys.

[02:55:24]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[02:55:26]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[02:55:26]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

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[02:56:38]  Unidentified speaker: There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you.