Episode 69: Social Science and Critical Rationalism

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Transcript

[00:00:10]  Blue: Welcome to the theory of anything podcast. We’ve got Peter and Brian again. How’s it going Brian?

[00:00:16]  Red: Oh Going really well. How are you guys?

[00:00:19]  Green: Good just great nice to see you guys again.

[00:00:22]  Red: Absolutely

[00:00:24]  Blue: So the last time we had Brian on the podcast That was probably weeks ago for our listeners, but this is actually not that long since we’re recording it But we released episodes out of order but last time we had Brian on the podcast we talked with him about his interest in both David Deutsch’s ideas The four strands and also how it could be applied with twin studies Which is something that a lot of fans of David Deutsch are very down on that was a very interesting discussion But we didn’t have time to get into how do you even apply? Carl Popper’s epistemology to fields like Brian’s or to social sciences in general or to economics Right, how do you apply his epistemology to these fields? So this is something that I know that I’ve been giving some thought to and I know Brian’s been giving some thought to and I should One of the things that had led to me thinking about it was Brian talking with me about it He started to email me saying how would you apply? Carl Popper’s epistemology to the social sciences and I hadn’t given it much thought prior to that point and he started sending me some white papers to look at and

[00:01:40]  Blue: One of them was the one Bruce Caldwell’s clarifying popper that will do a sum that we did a summary of at the beginning of this episode at least that will be when we get done recording it and But there was other ones he sent me as well And so we’ve had some discussion about this and so I wanted to bring him back on the show And I wanted to talk about what I thought was a super interesting topic that I don’t think I’ve seen that many people talk about So Brian, maybe let me just start with you How did you get interested in trying to apply Popper’s epistemology to social sciences and economics and into your field and Was that something that was a little bit hard to figure out what to do or did you kind of have an idea where you were going from the beginning

[00:02:27]  Red: Yeah, no, it’s a good question and to answer that second question first. No, I didn’t have there’s no road map or you know Well plotted out course. I so to give a little background. It’s almost I don’t know if it’s embarrassing. I just Regrettable I only became familiar with Popper’s work a few a handful of years ago we just philosophy sort of philosophy of science Philosophy of mind, which is another area. I’m really interested in at this point in my career they just were not parts of the the curriculum in my program when I was working on my masters and PhD and so We would get you would get sort of a smattering of it a lot of Bentham and Bacaria in terms of utilitarianism and the role that that played in Certain criminological theories deterrence theory in particular. So there was I don’t want to say there was no Exposure to what we might think of a sort of more classic Philosophy or moral philosophy that kind of thing. There was a bit And part of the fault is mine. I didn’t I just wasn’t as interested at that point in my life for whatever reason and so the the big thing that sort of Snapped my attention towards Popper was Deutsch reading Beginning of infinity which then prompted the need to read fabric of reality And there were a variety of other influences to that are a little more indirect because they weren’t necessarily dealing directly with Popper But folks like Douglas Hofstadter

[00:04:05]  Red: Who I really admire I mean just a Just a remarkable mind and so it was a very indirect pathway and I also I feel compelled to put in a disclaimer I haven’t sorted out all my thoughts on this yet I’m I this is very much a work in progress and nor should I ever be confused with an expert on Popperian thought I’m still but a student of that But I have you know, it’s kind of like Wanting to bolt the wings on the airplane and flight because I think the ideas are useful And so that’s why I’m sort of actively trying to work on them and also clarify them at the same time If that makes any sense.

[00:04:44]  Blue: Yes, it does By the way, this is a total tangent. You mentioned Douglas Hofstadter I just barely ordered Melanie Mitchell’s book analogy making as perception since yeah, Douglas Hofstadter’s student

[00:04:56]  Red: You might want to also check out. Do you have surfaces and essences Hofstadter?

[00:05:00]  Unknown: Yes

[00:05:01]  Blue: That’s one of my favorite books. I hated it the first time I listened to it

[00:05:05]  Red: Well,

[00:05:05]  Blue: I really thought it was terrible and then I thought about it for a while and I started to realize He’s got he’s I don’t know how close he is to the truth, but he’s got some creative ideas here that are worth another look

[00:05:17]  Red: No doubt about it. Just very briefly a bit more on this topic. It’s funny The the book I’ve relied more heavily on in terms of my work in drawing from Hofstadter was I’m strange loop and That was because I wrote a paper a few years back trying to sort out the intersections of behavioral genetics and Consciousness study of consciousness And so I don’t know if I’ve ever sent you that paper. I’m happy to send it to you if you like Oh,

[00:05:47]  Blue: yes, my all means.

[00:05:48]  Red: Yeah, and in kind of a it was a very cool moment. I Was able to share the paper with Hofstadter and he Thought it was interesting and at least not crazy. So that made me feel good, but Which is not to say he endorsed it. I’m just this is right.

[00:06:05]  Blue: No, I understood.

[00:06:07]  Red: I Don’t want to I never want to put words in another college mouth But yeah, it was just a cool moment for me as someone who admires this work Yeah,

[00:06:14]  Blue: and then Hofstadter said to me. This is exactly what I’ve been thinking. Yeah

[00:06:21]  Red: Not quite that but uh, it was uh, it was still it was pretty cool Yeah, and so I have actually I’m sort of where you are I have Mitchell’s book as well. I’ve not yet had a chance to read it But I’m it did the the topic of analogy is and one we can spend a lot of time on maybe another day But because I’m becoming increasingly interested in the arguments that he he and his co -author plot out in that book And I’m interested in Mitchell’s where she develops it as well I don’t know. I don’t have strong feelings about the veracity of it yet, but I’m definitely intrigued

[00:06:55]  Blue: Yeah, it’s it’s a creative idea. Let’s let’s let’s put put it that way Absolutely It’d be nice if we could figure out how to do something that could be implemented and we could actually try it out But we don’t seem to be at that level of knowledge with it with the theory yet

[00:07:09]  Red: Yep, maybe not quite yet, but who knows, you know Plenty of uh opportunity for insight to come so we’ll see.

[00:07:16]  Blue: Yeah okay, so let’s talk about Some of the difficulties of trying to apply popper to the softer sciences so

[00:07:29]  Red: Oh, it hurt me to hear you say that but go ahead.

[00:07:32]  Blue: Yeah So I don’t mean that in an offensive way. Let me know. I know. Let me clarify I’ve always felt that the term softer sciences unfortunately is sometimes like a pejorative In some people’s mouths.

[00:07:45]  Red: Yeah,

[00:07:46]  Blue: but I feel like it’s a meaningful statement, right? Like some sciences we we’ve developed them to the point where we’ve got these really very specific mathematical theories with really high empirical content. Obviously I have physics in mind here, right? Yeah, and and then it’s a kind of a sliding scale, you know, I mean like chemistries are hard science. It’s got these really specific mathematical theories with high empirical content and then you get down to like biology and It’s somewhat it relies very heavily on mathematical models and And but it’s like nothing like physics and there’s a lot of talking around things and and then you get into social sciences And it sort of depends on we call it social sciences and that’s a broad field like if you look at psychology There are some aspects of psychology that in very big deals in the psychology department That are very very hard science, right? Yes neurobiology neuroscience. Yeah, right And then there’s others that that nobody claims are right. We know that certain Types of psychological theories. Nobody’s pretending that they’re like physics, right? They’re doing their best to figure out how to Apply what they see as the scientific method With this they do try to follow what I would say is As close as they can a critical rationalists or falsificationist type of approach, right? We’re you’re trying to test. Okay. If I’m if I prompt this person, you know, let’s let’s I’ve read things and I’m this isn’t my field, but let’s say that like we’re testing Whether if we put subliminal Messages up if that causes the person to think about whatever the subliminal message was even though they couldn’t consciously See it.

[00:09:41]  Blue: So we actually do an experiment and we’ve got two hypotheses and one is and then we got a control group and we put up the subliminal message For one group and we don’t for the other and then we see that that the person actually mentions that word more often Or it causes them to be more likely to act in a certain way or something like that. Like there’s been experiments to this effect I don’t know what the outcomes were because I don’t know up top of my head here But that is following a critical rationalist approach, right? You’ve got two theories You’re trying to do an experiment. It’s going to falsify one of the two theories. You have a control set You’re doing a randomized controlled trial. So you’re trying so that you can make claims about causation um, you know this there is this falsificationist approach that is being used in these fields in a lot of cases, right? Well, it’s gonna say then you got like economics, which is like I’m not even sure how to Bruce Caldwell’s paper was was largely about trying to apply it to economics That’s a lot tougher. I mean like I have I had to stop and think about how would you apply Carl Popper’s epistemology to economics and that’s that’s even harder than social sciences, right? Because there you have so many causes that it’s it’s basically impossible to um Try to do a randomly controlled trial and economics into therefore control what the other causes are So how would you even go about applying Carl Popper’s epistemology to economics? anyhow, that would that would be kind of the sort of problems that I started to realize when I started talking with brian about this.

[00:11:28]  Blue: I had really not giving the given this much thought prior to that point and Those are all really good questions. So brian like in your field How like you’ve given this some thought specific to your field, right? How would you go about trying to apply Carl Popper’s epistemology to your field?

[00:11:48]  Red: well, I think uh At least I can I can tell you sort of where my thinking is now on it and you know, I can’t obviously assume that it won’t change moving forward but The the general approach I would want to take is one that may Maybe it might rightly be accused of cheating a little bit because I don’t know that I would want to import every single part of Popper’s vision of things uh, and then try and make that you know Coherent with sort of how we study behaviors, maybe your psychopathology or something like that But so I’ll I’ll I guess I want more of a All -A -Cart type approach and and so I’ll describe it and then you know We can talk about whether that seems fair enough or it’s wrong -headed or Or something like that. But so one of the first I’ll tell you this is more just a general point that both That I had never really thought clearly about until reading Popper and Deutsch and a few others and that’s the just the issue of verificationism and the The problem of thinking about science as being in the verification business I for me at least it it was quite meaningful in terms of changing how I thought about that because It was for me. It was a combination of either not thinking about the topic very much at all Or thinking about it very much in the way that you know, I think it would have been like Francis Bacon Would have described how science works

[00:13:22]  Red: Sort of the inductionist type approach and I mean that really When you it’s a simple idea that pervades a lot of different things and and The what I think is important about it is that just a simple reality and to me, this is not that Revolutionary in the sense that if you pressed any one of my colleagues enough They would tell you the same thing one particular study Is not sufficient to verify anything At least not To the point where we would say well, we’re not going to test This part of social bond theory anymore because it is I mean, it’s true. It’s we’re going to stop We would not You know, even someone who would you know, we might disagree about falsificationism I don’t I don’t think it would be fair to them to say that they would want to stop with a study and not At least think it provisional evidence right And so I think that really does matter and really is important and and the broader reason it matters and others talk about this too. And so we don’t We don’t have to go into it right now or can go into it later But the idea I think there’s probably Some some actual genuine Problems that arise just even in the lay public when you think of science as verifying things It sort of puts you in the direction of thinking Scientists or science as being an authority right And I I don’t you know, I think that actually is is problem if we fall too far down that rabbit hole. So But we’ll we’ll leave that aside for now

[00:15:00]  Red: So the I certainly would want to Lean away from the idea that we’re verify verifying anything in when we study things in behavioral and psychiatric sciences, but What about falsification like you said it it’s very tricky and I don’t know. I think I don’t guess I would push back Really hard or at all with the argument that well, you don’t falsify things in the way physics falsifies things I I agree But I guess my only Aside would be I don’t know that physics always falsifies things and the things in the way that folks think they do I mean, you know Newtonian mechanics giving way to and this is not a criticism this is a this is a Sort of pat on the back as in terms of this is what you should do right when you know when Relativity or rather Newtonian mechanics gives way to relativity That’s how it’s supposed to work. I would think and then Sort of the this is where I would you know, that’s a good example to draw in do it Relativity was the better explanation for how things worked doesn’t mean it’s the explanation it’s the better one now, but I mean as you know As is no secret in physics. It doesn’t square well with quantum mechanics. So there’s work to be done in some form Um, I think all of those things apply in the behavioral sciences in the psychiatric sciences I mean This is where you know, I When we’re talking about importing some of these ideas I think Dorch’s idea of a good explanation and his operationalization of that Is extremely valuable Something that is you know, when you’re purport To explain some phenomena you want that explanation to be

[00:16:57]  Red: Have as much breadth and width as you can you want to explain as much as you can and you want it hard to vary um And that just simple insight it really does matter because So you take the field of criminology far I mentioned Bentham and bakaria and there were many others as well, right? But you know in terms of our sort of roots back into the Enlightenment The rejection of the idea that people committed crimes because of Demons that were you know possessing them and causing them to do these reprehensible things and thus they were Souls in need of salvation When you know, it was very much revolutionary, you know for someone like bentham to come along and argue. No, it’s a You know, look, these are folks maximizing pleasure minimizing pain and the way that you order society in terms of Punishments and consequences are going to inform how these rational actors Maximize pleasure and minimize pain. I’m not saying that was right, but I’m saying it that’s very much a cogent type of testable argument, right? And and so it’s a in that way It’s a much better explanation than demons And as I say that as somebody who loves possession movies because I do Yeah

[00:18:20]  Green: Can I throw something out real quick? I just had a Kind of a random aha moment here. I hope it doesn’t I hope it keeps us on track But I I started thinking about well, what makes a soft science soft From a more David Deutsch Carl Popper kind of perspective and I started thinking about David Deutsch’s idea that human knowledge the growth of knowledge is fundamentally unpredictable Because it’s tied into creativity and consciousness and things that we don’t really understand um, and it goes along with popper’s ideas on Against historicism and you know that you can’t use social science to predict the future so It seems to me that perhaps the definition of social science is that it’s You have this this uh growth of knowledge aspect to it because you’re talking about human beings and that’s what we do So, you know, it could be something that perhaps Social scientists should be more aware of maybe thinking about just the the fundamental unpredictability of knowledge growth Does that make sense

[00:19:46]  Red: I think so I I would I don’t know that that’s at odds though with say the idea of you know that we can study Neurological functioning to understand, you know major depressive disorder or anything like that So I don’t know that anything. Yeah, I don’t know that anything you said. I really Have a would take deep issue with because I don’t know that it conflicts with the idea of What the you know the so -called social sciences are really doing I guess it could I mean I think it could depend on The topic too though, and if we get out here long enough, you know, maybe and it means more in a field like economics or political science Because I think that would sort of tie into poppers Myth of the framework and you guys can correct me if I’m wrong right this idea of historical trends and to what extent do they matter and and those types of things Assuming that you know

[00:20:43]  Green: Yeah, I know for myself when I really started reflecting on knowledge growth It kind of makes a you know, it has a really a A far reach will say that whenever you hear predictions all the time about right about I don’t know climate change or or what what you know, what’s going to happen and you know I just started thinking, you know, they’re Maybe climate change wasn’t the best example. That’s a loaded thing. Actually a pretty good It’s so tied into everything all predictions are so tied into knowledge growth down to the individual level And it just it really makes it makes it hard I

[00:21:27]  Red: I think no, I I think I have a little better sense of your comment now And and so I think it’s a good point this and maybe Maybe the implication of it is that we you know, we try to get out of the prediction business as much as we can and this is another reason why in the in terms of like trying to predict what will happen in the future and Maybe I don’t know again academic freedom means folks get to spend doing spend their time doing what they enjoy and what they want But for me it has sharpened my focus at least on Explanations and the development of ever better ones because while they may not enable me to predict the future They the reach that good explanation has as you know, sort of do it’s described is pretty remarkable And so I think that concept in particular too is one that matters for me in terms of when we build theories or explanations for anything in the behavioral sciences whether it’s the Developmental origins of schizophrenia or where crime comes from Um a whole variety of things the the search for better and better and better explanation Is uh something that it really holds my attention quite a bit

[00:22:44]  Blue: So let me try to steal man what I think peter is getting at So Let’s take maybe Intentionally take the worst examples we can so that we can show the problem That I think we’re kind of hinting at So when I studied psychology 101 in college um one of the most interesting classes I ever Took and almost maybe want to go into psychology as a field

[00:23:12]  Red: Sure,

[00:23:13]  Blue: um, but psychology a lot of the studies that they do I think that they you know cause as um Peter might say it causes his you know bullcrap meter to go off

[00:23:25]  Red: Yeah Right.

[00:23:27]  Blue: So like what I just happened to remember Is that they they did something where they were they were In in introducing the people that were in the experiment to information about old age Or showing them older people or maybe it was even just subliminal in some cases And then they would measure how long it took them to walk down the hallway To leave the the facility and unbeknownst to the person who’s In the experiment and what they found was is that when they primed people with um thoughts about old age That they walked much slower down the hallway and they tended to stoop more And so this was a real study that they brought up in my class, right?

[00:24:18]  Red: Sure

[00:24:18]  Blue: No, I actually don’t find this to be like completely unbelievable Like I believe we are primed by thoughts like this and it could well be that Showing me pictures of old age would cause me to maybe act it a bit more or something like that So i’m not even saying that it’s wrong But you can almost immediately see why people might feel very skeptical of this Of this study Because it’s trying to Find a law or something that Is going to be so obviously mitigated by so many other things And so you would come away even if it was a good randomly controlled trial Even if you know, I would really want to see it replicated a whole lot of times before I would give it much Credence at all as a theory And and then when it really comes down to it, it’s hard to believe you’ve actually found some sort of law of human nature Even if it was true at this time under this circumstance It seems like it would just depend on Culturally how we looked at older people. Maybe this is purely for a certain culture, right?

[00:25:26]  Blue: And it may not even replicate into other cultures And therefore you’re not actually finding something about human nature at all You may have only found something that was really parochial to The way western culture looks at old people That you know because you were using students or whatever and they were mostly from western culture And so I think that there’s a natural skepticism and I know That when I talk with fans of David Deutsche online They’ll quote things like this And they’ll have really big concerns not just with that study, but almost with the whole field Right because there is no such thing. Oh, you’ll hear them sometimes say there is no such thing as human nature That that we’re universal explainers. So there is no human nature. You can’t study human nature any attempt to study human nature Is false because we’re universal explainers and things can change even if you and do it use this example In his book, even if you tried to study genetically What you know the genetic influence of good looks Culturally that might change right and what we consider good -looking So that genetic factor that you found would turn out to be completely pro might might turn out to be completely parochial To just a certain culture that could tomorrow change into a different culture with a different standard for what is considered good Looks or even just a different standard for what we consider attractive. Maybe not even basing it on good looks So I think this is the steel man criticism that I I sense peter is getting at Is that even just the attempt to use the scientific method or critical rationalism, let’s say on

[00:27:11]  Blue: Some of the things that that these fields are trying to study Maybe they’re just mistaken from the outset and we shouldn’t even be trying to do this Okay, so by the way, I don’t agree with anything I just said No, no

[00:27:25]  Red: Well, and

[00:27:26]  Blue: in fact, I’d be happy to offer some really strong criticism Of what I just said, but I would like to get your reaction to this point of view

[00:27:34]  Red: Yeah, so I In I guess kind of in the spirit of generosity. I I would certainly concede that there are there are Among those points that you made some fair ones And and just a a reasonable description of how things work I think what I would say a few things one is any particular study Say take that the one the hypothetical you described that in and of itself Would not and should not constitute A test that, you know, were it to produce statistically significant results Tell you something fundamental about human nature At best, I think it could tell you Maybe tell you something about a part of human nature Um, but one one particular experiment in and of itself is is that’s not really what it would be attempting to do even The other thing that I think is tricky is Well, I’m certainly I’m One I would not push back against the idea that that taste and cultures Can change do change but So I think there are a few interesting actual points to make on that some of them has have to do is with aesthetics And relate directly to to arguments. Deutsch has made about there being, you know One not a bright line between the arts and the humanities and the rest of the sciences That all of them are sort of Tapping into actual beauty actual, you know Things that exist they’re all trying to get closer to truth so to speak And so I think in that regard absolutely culture can change, but if if dutch is correct Then we would expect there to be some things that persist if they actually are closer to this

[00:29:33]  Red: This type of aesthetic truth or truth about beauty or whatever the case might be Because we would expect those things to persist At least to some extent doesn’t mean that that everything is unchanging In regards to culture and and you know things that leisure activities or whatever the case might be So I don’t I don’t dispute that that can and does happen, but I think one well another sort of related point is that The engines of that change Are humans and humans are psychological and emotional lives reside in our our neurological functioning in our central nervous system um And so you get not just top down an influence of culture, but you get bottom up effects of individuals on on that culture And so culture is not this sort of supra organism to use dirkheim’s term You know, it’s not an uncaused cause it comes from somewhere And while I certainly can see that has effects it also there are things that affected Even you know historical trends, whatever, but so anyway, uh, then getting back to another point, um I think One we sort of maybe in your thought experiment allowed for us just assume this to be true, but you know Otherwise, you know assuming it’s not true One of the first places to start is you know the methodological sort of the the boring part so to speak of of research And that’s how big was the sample was did it have adequate statistical power?

[00:31:06]  Red: um Was there an error just an honest error that crept in because that can happen And you know a whole variety of things that we would need to think about before we would assume very much at all about uh These types of issues and and honestly some of this I think are avoidable sources of consternation You know If the larger sort of lay public consumers of scientific research Didn’t generally have a view of science as verifying things Uh more as you know provisionally looking at topics and either you know sort of falsifying or failing to falsify And we’ve come back to that in a minute um But if you look at you know, this study had you know, I Look at the paper where it’s covered in the wall street journal in new york times or any other outlet Uh and you know, they had a bunch of statistically significant results And I knew that because it’s got a little asterisk by the coefficient there in the table And I don’t really you know It matters only to me that the this seems important and oh by the way science verifies these hypotheses And so this high particular particular hypothesis about human psychology seems verified I mean that that can be I think that it can be a place where we sort of Can air air in our thinking about what a particular study means, right,

[00:32:27]  Red: right So okay, so let me take the example of people walking slower because they were exposed to stuff about old age Like I don’t know like I would I find that still a fascinating study Even though I can understand my people’s bull crap meter goes off with it The question though is what is it that I should be taking away from this study?

[00:32:48]  Blue: And I don’t think there’s an obvious answer I probably I should not be taking away that if I want people to walk more slowly I should expose them to Stuff about old age. I I suspect that that won’t work in a lot of cases, right and it wouldn’t be useful anyhow But I do come away with this idea that we are impacted about what we’re what we’re currently thinking about that It actually changes the way we think about things And I think that’s something that you have we’ve seen repeated in tests all over the place, right? Where if you have a primed thought That it does change the way you think about things I think about here the case where they they had the experiment where They gave people like a candle and thumbtacks in a little box and they’re supposed to figure out how to Stick the light the candle and stick it to the wall And whether you can complete the task or not comes down to whether you think of the box As the box containing the items you’re allowed to use Or if the box is one of the items that you’re allowed to use And if the person conceptualizes it as the box is one of the items that you’re allowed to use You use the thumbtack you stick the box to the to the wall you put the candle and Sticking out of the box and you’re done, right?

[00:34:04]  Blue: But if a person has not been primed for that many many many of them will fail to even think That they can use the box in this experiment I mean like there’s there’s tons of studies that I think that where this there’s this thread of You computationally we just can’t think of everything everything at once And so being primed to make some sort of difference And I think I would take that away from this maybe otherwise, you know bullcrap Experiment that it’s still getting at something that’s true. It’s still getting at something that’s useful and That I would want to know about Right And when I think of it in that way, it’s part of the growth of knowledge even if the individual Study is only indirectly doing that You know, there’s nothing I can take away as a specific law of human nature here That doesn’t matter so much as the realization that priming my brain makes some sort of difference

[00:35:02]  Red: Yeah, and and so I’m glad you use the word Or phrase law of human nature because it sparked the mind something I I did want to mention and we don’t have to linger on it. It’s just something I thought about so there The philosopher brian McGee wrote a short Book about pauper and I think this is where he said this And I don’t believe he was referencing a direct quote from pauper. I think he was just sort of describing His thoughts on something and and we talk about, you know, physical laws Or laws in physics rather that you take speed of light or something, you know of that nature and you know, we It I think in some ways it matters how we think about them and whether we think about them as Descriptive or proscriptive So, you know, if you think about a law like a speed limit The law says, you know, you shall not go past 55 mile an hour. It’s prescriptive. Here’s what you are going to do But at least unless I’m misremembering what McGee sort of described There was reason at least from pauper’s point of view to view them as descriptive That, you know, the speed of light describes the fastest moving thing that we have yet observed But I don’t know that necessarily means that, you know, if we happen to find something moving faster than the speed of light We should then conclude it’s supernatural Right. It’s not it’s simply moving faster than light. So you have now found the upper limit of You know, how fast something can move in the universe

[00:36:39]  Blue: Well, one obvious thing that would mean let’s say we actually did find something moving faster than the speed of light That would be a problem for a very hard problem for general relativity, right? It’s it’s a falsification I kind of hesitate to use that term because I don’t think I think it’s a little bit misleading It’s more a problem. It will become a falsification once we have a new theory But but right away, you know, oh my gosh There’s something wrong here, right and we need a new explanation Now, maybe that new explanation turns out to be oh, I didn’t connect my chord correctly and the instrument’s off, right?

[00:37:19]  Unknown: Absolutely.

[00:37:19]  Red: In fact, I believe that’s happened. That’s happened.

[00:37:22]  Unknown: Yes

[00:37:22]  Red: Something and that’s maybe that’s why that example came to mind because I think at one point it was purported That a particle was observed to be moving faster than light only to find out that it was just a problem with the record,

[00:37:36]  Blue: yeah Neutch mentions that in one of his papers. That’s actually how I knew about it. So Ah,

[00:37:40]  Red: okay I should have assumed that Can

[00:37:43]  Green: I ask you a question brian?

[00:37:45]  Unknown: Yes.

[00:37:45]  Green: Well, just to give you a little bit of background Bruce and I released Well, we spoke for Six hours. I think a lot more than six hours in what I think are some of the most interesting conversations. I’ve ever been a part of trying to sort of rectify this this idea that on one hand humans are universal explainers and it goes along with this idea of universality and and bruce really helped me understand a lot more about the implications on that and on the other hand what what seems I don’t know to kind of Obvious a little bit to both of us Which might not be obvious to a lot of fans of david doige, but it seems kind of It seems true to me is that people are kind of born with the abilities With certain abilities, I guess or or temperaments or however you want to put that And you know this idea of IQ Well, okay, so to a To david doige or at least many of fans of david doige Ability and IQ is just a matter of time and interest Okay, which is

[00:39:14]  Blue: even for severely mentally challenged cases Yes,

[00:39:17]  Green: which makes I think a lot of sense in a theoretical way But you know, like I said, I’m a special education teacher. I have a lot of like real -world experience that Brains are quite hard to change or or minds however you ever you want to think about it um What do you think brian? Is that I mean, is that an interesting point on on this this more theoretical perspective on humans being universal explainers Is that worth thinking about in your research?

[00:39:49]  Red: so I think I think there are a few ways to approach answering that other than yes It’s very interesting and and then I think in an important sense It doesn’t do as much to the idea of studying individual differences or You know cognitive abilities intelligence personality doesn’t really harm that as much as it may seem at first blush And I’ll give you at least a couple examples of why I think that’s the case I don’t know if it will be persuasive at all, but We’ll give it a shot um so At them to start out on a very in a very basic sense Instead of let’s not talk about universal explainers. Let’s talk about universal blood pumpers Kind of weird, right? But the our species homo sapiens Is required to you know, it’s part of our evolutionary lineage. We uh Blood is a vital part of our ability to live and thus we need to pump all over our body and barring some type of you know, sort of medical anomaly or Developmental disorder all humans are born with harks that pump and function so If we were to try and say do a twin study on the heritability of having a heart Uh, there there is no heritability of it. This is zero because heritability is a calculation of Relate to variance or variation in a population and and so in this twin study of having a heart Heritability is going to be zero and if there are individuals in the population who do not have them For whatever reason they’re going to not have them because of some environmental Factor they had an accident. They have a severe illness Something along those lines, right?

[00:41:49]  Red: so in that sense, uh You know, it doesn’t when there are universal features of a species two eyes two legs Two arms doesn’t make sense to talk about Heritability in the context of what we do in twin studies because if there’s variation in the number of arms that humans have typically that’s due to Environmental intervention, maybe either be an accident or the necessity necessity to amputate a limb or something like that So, um, I don’t have any problem with there. There can be universal features of an organism that aren’t heritable Where where you have to be careful with language though concerns Things that can vary in a population even for universal features and so if we return to the heart We all have hearts, but there’s a lot of variation in terms of how those hearts function and the capacity that they have The to pump blood to pump efficiently to avoid disease states those types of things And still there are things in the environment that create that variation But that is an opportunity for heritable variation to be a factor as well. And so Another example we might talk about or you know, well, we can go to some type of cognitive personality trait um And we can I’ll I’ll I hesitate for some reason But we’ll just linger on it for a second take something like intelligence The it’s such a part of the reason I don’t want to linger on it’s such a fraught topic unfortunately, but There is such a rich Body of evidence and it’s not from one field That’s from multiple fields neuroscience neurobiology medicine psychiatry, you know, and for a variety of reasons that you know to understand You know measures of intelligence as capturing

[00:43:44]  Red: You know sort of intuitive Ways that the brain is functioning speed at which messages are related processing speeds Uh, you know the effects of things like myelin, national nerve cells those types of things You see the the sort of the Those skills erode as you disrupt key brain circuits you see sadly, you know in the patients of dementia or you know disease that calls lesions in the brain that disrupts these things so But the brain is a good example because I mean we’re twin study of How you know having a brain the heritability zero, right?

[00:44:23]  Red: Everybody has one But if we start to talk about then say a structure that can vary and these studies have been done, whether it’s uh structure of the hippocampus or the some cortical feature Or problems with broka or vernacles area that lead to language delays These things can all vary and they vary for both, uh, you know heritable and environmental reasons and so the My only point is universal features aren’t are not at odds with individual differences um And the larger reason they’re not is that we like our You know our primate cousins and the rest of the natural world At least it you know if we take sort of a materialist naturalist view, which is the one I hold is that we You know, we have an evolutionary lineage in history and you know our all of our assemblages our our physiology our organs our cognitive Capacities all of those things are the you know the product of evolutionary forces, whether that’s natural selection drift byproducts of other adaptations whatever it might be is in that umbrella under that umbrella of evolution and so these are just concepts that are necessary when you talk about Uh animals that evolved uh via natural selection and other processes So that’s why I just don’t perceive any Any real problem with these things

[00:45:52]  Green: thank you

[00:45:53]  Red: Absolutely, I don’t know if I answered your question or said anything persuasive, but I appreciate you raising it

[00:45:59]  Blue: so I think the The key thing here though is that the the fact that Human beings are universal expiters. We’re assuming that theory is true for the moment It does raise a particular problem Whereas if I’m trying if I see social sciences as being about trying to understand human nature Human nature could be a moving target very easily

[00:46:26]  Red: because

[00:46:27]  Blue: Of this the fact that we are universal explainers

[00:46:30]  Red: sure

[00:46:31]  Blue: um in So I actually agree with everything I just said there, but it seems like I can’t then use that to say there’s no such thing as human nature and let me explain why

[00:46:43]  Red: yeah,

[00:46:44]  Blue: um So let’s say that I start with something really basic and like I’ll I’ll talk with fans of david doigt They’ll say there’s no such thing as human nature and because we’re universal explainers blah blah blah and I’ll say something like and genes cannot influence us something that they often bring up which You know tons of science showing that that’s not the case sure, um And I’ll say okay Can the can does pain influence you? Right like do you not like to be in pain? And I mean like the answer is kind of obvious that Yes, you are influenced by pain and you don’t like it because it’s unpleasant and it hurts And then I’ll say okay That is evolutionary psychology right there and it’s an example that we all know is true Right, it’s that is human nature and then they’ll they’ll say they’ll do something like this they’ll say Oh, but there’s this guy he works at the circus and he likes pain because he gets paid for it Or maybe he’s a masochist and and they’ll try to find an exception case and I’ll say look I’m just looking over the population right do human beings in general Dislike pain and even those counter examples you give me are not straightforward right even gondi did not like pain, right?

[00:48:01]  Blue: Um, I’ll say this really kind of is a hard law of human nature at least at our current level of knowledge You might convince me that it won’t stay that way, you know We we learned to develop drugs that shut off pain and we figure out how to do that And so then people don’t mind going to surgery because they can shut the pain off and yes that knowledge from our universal Explinorship can even modify how we interact with pain and may someday entirely remove pain as a source of suffering Okay, but we’re not there today. So as least as of today I can talk about evolutionary psychology Or human nature and I can talk about it being directed by the genes because it’s the genes that wire us this way And it makes perfect sense And even if you tell me it’s not going to be that way a hundred years from now It does not change that it is that way today

[00:48:55]  Red: This is uh, I hate to jump in too fast, but this is a good actually. I’m glad you mentioned pain This is a good example to make a Sock kind of the same point I was raising earlier So and and there are a variety of points to make one You know, what let’s set aside whether pain is always Adverse or you know, unenjoyable or to be avoided or constitute suffering Um, I think you know the psychologist paul bloom made this point in a recent book is Sometimes we actively seek out discomfort and perhaps even minor suffering in the pursuit of something else that we want to achieve whether you know, that’s a hard physical workout Or a taxing academy to get into a certain profession or you know, military training

[00:49:41]  Blue: By the way, they always raise that as an issue. Hey, I go I enjoy pain when I’m working out. See that doesn’t that that proves that as a universal explainer I can rethink pain in a different way. So yeah, sorry go on

[00:49:53]  Red: I I don’t I would agree that you know, there isn’t there’s a cognitive element to the interpretation of pain We’re capable of saying, you know, it’s not just our body Flashing pain and and demanding a counter response, you know, we have the the cognitive experience of You know knowing that, you know, this pain is not dangerous This pain is from bench pressing 10 times. And so I don’t need this. There’s no medical care to be salt There’s no fight or flight response that need responding to there is nothing wrong And in fact, this is pain salt out, but I You know, there are other things to all to remember to and one is related to earlier We also we know that there’s individual variation In susceptibility to pain enjoyment of pain all of these types of things.

[00:50:42]  Red: So that’s one where we talk about one a universal of having pain And two variability in in the experience, which is can be partly heritable is partly heritable Then the third thing is this is sort of a An important point of consideration from, you know, the world medicine There are rare cases where individuals are born Without the ability to feel pain and I’m blanking on the medical name for it at the moment But this is this is not Something to be wished for in this sense because these folks live very difficult lives and often die tragically young For very minor things because you know, it may be They were in a car accident and didn’t realize they were bleeding internally and so didn’t seek medical help until it was too late So the the absence of pain And the the danger of that also in some ways points to the importance of it and sort of the so it may not be that aversion to pain is is a law of human nature, but it might be more defensible to say something like Attending to pain is part of our nature kind of thing

[00:51:54]  Green: Hey, can I read a a tweet from David Deutsch real quick that I just think is so relevant here Keep in mind. This is probably an area of his philosophy that I’m a little bit Kind of like I’ve hinted at before I’m Probably the most I don’t want to say disagree with but it Maybe he just takes a little too far But I still am influenced by it and find it very interesting But he says the phenomenon of genetic influence as conceived by most people doesn’t exist A pessimistic mixture of correlation equals causation Anthropomorphism of genes behaviorism and ignoring creativity An unusual unusually strong inborn fear of heights may cause or prevent a love of skydiving That was he really lays it out there. I think

[00:52:48]  Blue: That’s that’s the most clear cut statement I’ve heard from him. I kind of gathered. That’s what he believed But that’s that’s a very clear cut statement. I don’t think I’ve seen before

[00:52:57]  Red: It may seem a little ironic. I don’t disagree at all. Wow. Um But with with this proviso I suppose so maybe I mean so Deutsch might view this as me disagreeing with him Although I don’t think that it really is so for example, we talked about this when we chatted about twin studies Simply doing a twin study and finding a trait to be partly heritable should be I mean it should be interpreted as it Uh is which is in a sense associational correlation or you’re explaining variance, right? But that doesn’t mean you’re saying that genes are causing anything but but there that also Nor does it mean that it’s impossible to do those types of studies Uh, there are designs that allow you to do the in animals. You can do them with knockout studies in people where obviously they’re Very understandable ethical constraints on how we study these things so but we that doesn’t mean that can’t be done in fact some very interesting ways of doing them involve combinations of twin studies and genome -wide association studies that are used to develop what are called polygenic risk scores and you sort of combine those two things and you do you are able to start to calculate sort of causal effects in the a la judea pearls framework of you know

[00:54:18]  Red: Graph theory and and path analysis those types of things and so I don’t I don’t know that we want to make strong arguments About genes not being able to cause any but I also have a sense that maybe that’s not what he’s saying And and could be pointing to confusion that folks have about The very thing that I try to caution Students about this when you know, maybe sitting in an intro class with me or learning about this for the first time There are no direct connections of genes on behavior in the way that a simplistic understanding might lead you to think And I don’t mean simplistic pejoratively. I just mean someone coming new to the topic You know, it is there. It’s a very very very long Chain of causality to get from genetic variation to some phenotype assuming that chain of causality is even present Right, we have to do the hard work to find that out. But it’s going to you know, it will have to traverse You know some version of a sequence from you know base pairs and dna to either regulating the expression of other genes or you know The it could be a gene that varies in the the type of protein it produces when it Strings its amino acids together or codons together. So the the point is At least, you know, for folks who work on this topic, we’ll use What’s probably unfortunate shorthand and say something like, you know, violence is heritable There aren’t genes for violence there and so But at the same time people could be absolutely forgiven For thinking that that is what we’re saying because we’re using sort of a jargon that can at times be confusing.

[00:56:00]  Red: But I The the idea of overcoming a fear of skydiving. Yeah, absolutely But that doesn’t that also doesn’t originate out of the ether, right? There are personality styles like We all have a fear of height. Some of us are more, you know, if we think in terms of classic big five personality Openness and extraversion are two probably pretty key traits If if we’re Score high on a measure of openness and that we’re always seeking novelty and same with extraversion always seeking novelty new experiences You may scare the holy hell out of you to look out the door of that plane At at whatever height you’re at and then fling yourself out of it and pull the ripcord And then it may be intensely fun. You do it again, but I can promise you this My personality is such that if I’m jumping out of the plane that’s caused the plane’s crashing Even then I’m gonna try to land it first so I’m terrified of heights and also would probably not score high enough on any of the the key metrics to warrant wanting to try and overcome them so That that may be the one quibble what I’d have with the example is that, you know, decisions to overcome sort of maybe these evolved phobias I think yeah, absolutely. They exist.

[00:57:21]  Red: There are some folks who have, you know, pet snakes and reasons there You could cogently argue there are reasons we have to to fear things that are predatory and have been in our past But aren’t now And they overcome them all the time Stephen Pinker has a very famous example from the blank slate And he’s making this point that that’s sort of I’m trying clumsily to make Uh about the there being no reason to fear genes as deterministic influences and thus try to fight against arguments that we proceed to say that Steve said something along the lines of, you know, uh, my selfish genes Alluding to Dawkins famous book might May be doing everything they can possibly do to drive me to reproduce but I’ve decided that, you know A family and not something I want so myself as genes can go jump in the lake, right to sort of paraphrase He’s right. Of course. There but I mean so if that but if that’s the version of genetic determinism You’re pushing back against there’s no need because There’s no reason To think it

[00:58:27]  Blue: so can I use my own example here for a second give give some There’s a Peter’s right. We talked about this in several episodes. So I’m going to be slightly summarizing what we talked about in those episodes Let’s use fear as the first example because that’s probably the closest to what I sense David Deutsch wants Or at least the fans of David Deutsch want the truth to be okay that that Fear is something that’s Quote unpleasant, but because we’re universal explainers It’s not that hard for us to really get a thrill out of it and turn it into something we enjoy Which is why people go see horror movies or why I play Horror vr, which you know, my wife thinks I’m mad that I intentionally go into a vr haunted house and get haunted And I’m scared to death, you know And that I’m actually find that thrilling right and she can’t even understand where I’m coming from, right? um, so From a certain point of view, I completely agree with the Deutsch Deutsch fan viewpoint that because we’re universal explainers It is not a straightforward.

[00:59:35]  Blue: The genes can simply tell us you will be you will find fear unpleasant And so you will avoid things that cause fear that is impossible for the genes to do to a universal explainer Now having said that It it would be wrong to say Therefore because of this universal explainers are not influenced by genes and that’s what I keep taking exception to First of all, my wife will not and probably never will learn to enjoy going into vr and being scared So there is only a certain percentage of people who do decide to go skydiving and get a thrill out of and would get a thrill out of it Now it’s because of that you have to then explain why do not everybody want to go

[01:00:23]  Green: Why

[01:00:24]  Blue: does not everybody want to go skydiving?

[01:00:25]  Unknown: Why

[01:00:25]  Blue: does not everybody?

[01:00:27]  Unknown: Why

[01:00:27]  Blue: is it only a small percentage of people who want to go skydiving or go into vr horror? And that there’s so many people who it is just not for them. Well, yeah, that’s genetic influence genetics can influence Universal explainers and we’re seeing it right there even with the fear example I still think the fear example is maybe too easy. So let’s go back to the pain example. Okay Yes, it’s true that when I back before I had my health problems and I used to work out And you it would be painful to work out And but you would enjoy it and you would enjoy that signal of pain and you would look forward to working out because you knew it meant it was going to make your muscles larger and it would give you these health benefits and So you had this explanation that allowed you to enjoy pain. So you can’t say pain is just unpleasant I don’t know that I buy that argument. It’s kind of true But the the truth is is that first of all it was hard to learn to work out in the first place because you have to go through several days Of pain that lasts for several days even though I had an explanation for why it was there and I was going to get past it I had to wait It really wasn’t enjoyable for me until I got to the point that I was doing it often enough that the pain would go away within A very short order right because as you start to exercise the pain starts to be something that’s it goes right away Away right away.

[01:01:53]  Blue: Whereas at first it will linger for days And when during the period where it lingers for days, it didn’t matter that I had an explanation Oh, I’m gonna feel good in the long run. I still hated it, right? It is still very unpleasant experience and then secondly working out pain just isn’t a very good example because I’ve experienced kidney stones And if I had to go through the level of pain that I go through with kidney stones each time I worked out I promise you no one would choose to work out, right? It’s there are levels of pain so severe That there is no way to reconceptualize it As an enjoyable thing it just can’t be done or at least it can’t be done by the vast majority of human beings Let me say that and I’ll leave a little bit of an out because who knows, right? I think gave David Goggins would still work out, but Um, and obviously part of this is is how Tolerant you are of pain, you know things like that, but kidney stone pain I don’t think anyone can really just tolerate it at its height, right? It’s it’s There’s what I call above the line and below the line There’s a certain amount of pain that you can be in Where you can just ignore it and because of that You can more easily conceptualize it as enjoyable And then there’s this above the line pain that I’ve experienced where I promise you no amount of Reconceptualization through your universal explainer module is going to cause you to start enjoying this pain It is not possible, right?

[01:03:27]  Blue: And if I were to give maybe the most obvious example of this it would be women and labor Here you have the ultimate example of something severely severe form of pain equivalent to kidney stone pain And also it’s being reconceptualized, right? Because you know that you’re doing this to give birth And yet you you really won’t find women who say oh, I totally enjoy labor pain Right. It just does not exist Like even ones that don’t get epidurals and want the quote full birth experience They go do things to try to reduce the pain as much as possible They get into a bathtub and and they go to great lengths and teach classes on this because there is no way to take labor pains and simply Re -re -imagine them as enjoyable because they are above the line And at this point the gene genetic influence that has been put inside you at least for most people Maybe you could overcome this with lots of meditation or something But at least for most people at their current level of knowledge The genes are going to force you to think about nothing but that pain because it’s so unpleasant And so I don’t really find the pain example a good example I think it’s the type of example that a person who’s never had labor pain or kidney stone pain would use But anyone who has would go oh, yeah, you know what you’re totally full of ball crap with that example And that’s kind of how I see it right is that there’s kind of some truth to it clearly

[01:04:58]  Blue: to a degree As universal explainers we can we can choose to Look at unpleasant experiences and imagine them as pleasant But I don’t think that that’s a full explanation I think that there absolutely are situations where it’s so severe That the genes are going to win like when I’m in kidney stone pain I don’t think there’s much of anything I can do at the at least at the height of the pain Other than think about the fact that I have a kidney stone Which is what the genes want me to be doing, right? And I actually went through a whole semester where I was in kidney stone pain for a month And luckily it wasn’t at the height So I would be able to take pills and I had to make this choice between am I going to take tests doped up on pain killers So I can’t maybe think very straight or am I going to take that in pain? So I can’t maybe think very straight luckily the pain levels sort of Went down a little bit They they pick can you stone pain tends to start super high and then your body kind of gets the hint and Starts to reduce the pain somewhat, but it was still pretty severe And it was a really tough semester There was there was nothing I could do except just accept I’m going to get lower grades this semester and this is going to be harder for me And I’m going to just do the best I can and all the teachers work with me. They let me take tests from home This is b y u.

[01:06:19]  Blue: They’re pretty trusting Amazingly trusting they would send tests home with me and say, okay Just don’t take longer than an hour on this and then give it back to me, you know And I got through that semester that way and I didn’t have to drop out of school due to this kidney stone But I’m telling you that was a massively painful experience and It it is absolutely pain will force you to think about Make it really hard for you to concentrate on anything else If it’s a high enough level of pain

[01:06:49]  Red: Yeah, I I think those are all really good points and and there was one Additional thing I wanted to mention it’s going to sound sort of only tangentially related to what you just discussed but I think it’s a it turns out it’s a relevant point of consideration and it also relates to sort of Unfortunate misunderstandings when we talk about genetic influences on things So I think there are a couple studies that come to mind that are good examples. So one they show how Twin studies mesh so well with other arenas of scientific science and medicine and that Psychological science excuse me and medicine and those types of things which was a theme in the nature paper of ours We discussed nature reviews paper Um, and so in this in in a couple of particular studies. I have in mind these folks were looking at sort of the the Functional connectivity between the pre areas in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the amygdala Sort of the the interplay inter exchange Uh that exists and is facilitated by these cortical structures being able to talk back and forth with these um limbic structures And so you a lot of folks it’s quite common for folks to have heard of at least heard of the amygdala In the past it’s been called the fear center of the brain. That’s that’s a Pretty bad oversimplification, but it’s certainly involved in threat circuitry threat awareness awareness of things and and has some part something to do with the experience of fear which we’ve been talking about and so when you like when you study Why people differ in the the the nature of the functional connectivity of the frontal cortex and the these limbic structures They do differ.

[01:08:39]  Red: It’s the first thing to think about. Yes, they have amygdala. Yes, they have a prefrontal cortex So in that regard, they’re not different. But in the regard to the nature and degree and Functional connectivity of those regions of the brain there are differences. And so that then allows you to ask the question um What explains the differences and so when you do twin studies what you find is that it’s On on average there these the functional differences that exist are moderately to Small heritable estimates that emerge with a lot of the variants being consumed by the environment But the bigger point is this these are the types of things. There’s no magic effect that genes are having The the genes are doing their jobs in terms of taking care of in this case the you know the Creation and wiring of brain circuitry But that doesn’t mean knowing that these differences knowing that their functional connectivity exists a certain way It’s going to tell you every time what someone is going to want to do But but at least no one that i’m aware of is making that argument This is simply a small step forward in understanding how our brains What is happening when we make decisions feel emotions these types of things? But it’s one of those things that just butt one step forward But I think it matters because You know, we don’t I don’t think we want to go too far in the direction of thinking that something Magical happens when a human makes a decision And by too far, I mean thinking that

[01:10:18]  Red: Our brains uninvolved with that I think the better more defensible understanding is that as we understand more about How brains operate why the structures of the brain differ from person to person why the functionality differs from person to person We’ll understand better How decisions are made what decisions are made But then there the the element that I think is also important is in folks like pinker and maybe dutch pointed this out when our species has really amazing things like language and languages By nature combinatorial, which means you can take a limited I know you guys know this take a limited number of symbols combine them into what seems like an Limitless number of words to convey what feels like a limitless number of thoughts and ideas and arguments and and those can include arguments for you know, why you shouldn’t should or shouldn’t do something why you should enjoy skydiving or not and Those arguments can effectively change the thinking of other people. So again, it’s you know, it’s not mysterious or in some ways A lot of it’s not understood yet, but certainly not magical

[01:11:32]  Blue: Okay, let me actually peter. Let me go. Let me have you go first. Do you have any questions? I

[01:11:38]  Green: I think my questions have kind of Monoplies the time a little bit.

[01:11:42]  Unknown: Why

[01:11:42]  Green: don’t I know there’s stuff you want to talk about bro. So why don’t So

[01:11:45]  Blue: I do have one last thing that probably will take 15 minutes to discuss and in the bruce called well paper He quotes popper on the idea that he calls the unity of science of the popper calls it unity of method Um, let me actually read from the bruce called well paper I think this is like in the footnotes or something but somewhere in the paper. He says this he says sometimes popper expresses this point more strongly In this sex this is quoting popper now in this section I’m going to propose a doctrine of the unity of method that is to say the view that all theoretical or generalizing sciences Make use of the same method Whether they are natural sciences or social sciences um And then then called well says a few pages later though popper acknowledges that that The use within the social sciences of quote what may be called the method or a lot of logical or rational reconstruction Or perhaps the zero method accounts for perhaps the most important difference Between the methods of natural of the natural sciences So then called well goes on to say if the unity of science thesis Is to make any sense. I think it is best to interpret it as stating that all scientific explanations shared the same structure This also seems to be the position taken by popper. Okay so this is something i’ve given a lot of thought to and There seems to be drastic Disagreements between my read of popper on this and pretty much every other critical rationalist. I have talked to Okay, um, but when I read popper I see him as saying there is one epistemology.

[01:13:33]  Blue: It applies to everything It applies to history even if you don’t think about as a science. It applies to philosophy. It applies to And this epistemology is evolutionary epistemology It applies to science. It applies to social sciences. It applies to Even things that you might not think of sciences at all. It applies to how we solve problems how we Come up with ideas and that it applies to statistical inference It applies to what we now call induction induction in this sense is actually just critical rationalism Okay, it’s it’s a form of critical rationalism. There are no exceptions There is exactly one epistemology and it is universal across everything Now I have talked to so many people now who Read popper have read the same books as me or some have read more popper than me And there seems to be an almost universal disagreement with me on this to the point where I’ve had people tell me for example That probability theory has no place in poppers epistemology I can like literally quote to them where he wrote a whole chapter on this. I had I had one Person I was doing a zoom with and we started talking and I mentioned probability and poppers epistemology He said no probability theory plays no role in poppers epistemology I go popper wrote a whole chapter chapter 8 of logic of scientific discovery about how to integrate probability theory into his epistemology He’d go that’s impossible Because there is no way to falsify a probabilistic theory. So it cannot be part of popper’s epistemology I go but he wrote a whole chapter on it. You should be like go look up the chapter go. Nope. That’s impossible And it was a really funny conversation. I

[01:15:19]  Blue: have funny conversations like this all the time There seems to be a very wide opinion that Popper was something was talking about something far more narrow and that it didn’t doesn’t apply to everything So I wanted to maybe talk with you about that because it seems like that’s relevant to what you’re talking about Is we have these other areas social sciences software sciences economics And at some level I do see popper is saying even economics must fall under critical rationalism It must be ultimately that it’s a form of critical rationalism Even if at first it seems like it’s doing something else or it doesn’t seem to fit well And I do think that that’s a problem like I’ve really struggled with how to make sense of and we did a I did a whole series of podcasts on donald cambell’s theory and his attempts to under to unify popper’s epistemology across basically everything And I gave I found counter examples to it. I came up with three different counter examples one of which Turned out to be false vaden Showed that I was wrong on one of them but the other two seem to be correct and I’ve never really felt like I’ve fully understood how to Integrate this idea of the universe unity of science that I see popper as believing in across absolutely all Things that I would consider knowledge creation or science or whatever And I feel like this is an extension of the problem That it’s a little hard to figure out how to apply it to say economics thoughts on that

[01:16:53]  Red: It’s a great it’s a great point. There’s a lot of fun to think about too. I don’t know Again, I’m going to do my best And but I won’t contend that I have my final answer even a good one But so this is sort of how I’ve been thinking about it So to I think to make the point I would want to make I would start with actually Something more in the legal sphere of things not even necessarily academia Think about, you know a criminal trial and presume in this instance That we don’t have anything like closed circuit television catching someone robbing the store Okay, but someone’s been arrested for this burglary and we highly suspect that the person that has been arrested Actually did commit the burglary. We’ve got no way to verify it Uh, nor does the jury the you know, obviously have a way to we can’t Put on the closed circuit television and show them the person breaking into the store So we have to build a case by sifting through Relevant evidence keeping what seems relevant discarding the rest and then using that To make our argument knowing that at the end of the day you could always come back and say well, you can’t prove it We’re right Uh, I can’t and so that there there’s something important there that I think’s worth keeping in mind

[01:18:18]  Blue: I agree

[01:18:19]  Red: good

[01:18:19]  Blue: example

[01:18:20]  Red: Yeah, then we you know, we go to something like economics or political science or you know, the things of that nature We you know, we we do let’s say we do 100 studies Testing some esoteric idea and economics, you know about price theory or something like that We get a very very consistent pattern of results and and all those things and uh, these are really robust studies on one hand you haven’t proven any law of economics and uh I think my response would be of course we have it. That’s not what we’re doing We’re we’re retaining what looks like the we’re conjecturing and trying to refute And until we can get something that looks A lot like a reputation and we have to know and remember that you know To get that is That’s an iterative process one study is not going to do it 100 might not do it But I think it’s feasible to at least in practice reject something But we’re not getting it truth We’re getting at provisional knowledge that we’ve tried to sift through All of the nonsense to get to the things that look a lot less like nonsense And and I think that also can be part of the difficulty In terms of creating consternation about how to make these things work is We often don’t think about all of the The de facto wrong explanations that we never even bothered to test Because they’re so obviously wrong we wouldn’t devote our time to Right like uh, we would never argue that price theory results from people who eat Tomatoes and then desire to overspend on a particular commodity or something bizarre like that It’s just that’s a non -starter. It’s never tested.

[01:19:59]  Red: And so there is a wasteland of bad ideas that We just assume to be that right and so we don’t even bother with those and we Try and run through what at least seem to be intuitively good explanations for whatever it is we’re trying to explain But I think the heart of what and i’m not arguing popper said this This is maybe more my read of it or my extrapolation of it Is that the heart of what unifies these things is uh Is conjecture and refutation, you know, we propose ideas we test them and we Reject them if the need arises Uh, but until that need arises we retain them knowing all along that we haven’t proved anything But we’re not in the business proof. We’re in the business of better explanation.

[01:20:46]  Blue: Yeah, well, okay I don’t really disagree with everything you just said, but let me let me give you some Troublingly hard cases. Yeah, I can make them on the fly here.

[01:20:58]  Red: Absolutely.

[01:20:58]  Blue: So let’s use the example of a courtroom case Okay So it’s easy for me to say a courtroom case takes the form of conjecture and refutation Okay But when you really look at the way we do a courtroom case What you really do is you try to find corroborating evidence You try to you try to say okay I can place this person that they were, you know had Typical motive means an opportunity that they had a reason they wanted to do this and They could have been available at the time and you know In a lot of cases we talk about circumstantial evidence people use the term circumstantial evidence as a negative Well, that’s just circumstantial evidence But the vast majority of cases and convictions come from circumstantial evidence, right? I mean there’s at least from a Just some degree.

[01:21:47]  Red: Yes. Yep. Yeah, it’s I guess you would know that that’s I’ve Listened to a lawyer podcast where they claimed that but you would probably know even better than lawyers would No, I wouldn’t claim any more expertise But I think that’s or it’s a reasonable point.

[01:22:00]  Blue: Yeah, so the fact is is that what we’re really trying to do Doesn’t fit super comfortably into even conjecture and refutation It doesn’t it’s not like it’s directly at odds with it. You are conjecturing this person did this And but then you’re not really trying to refute that they did it You’re you’re you’re actually trying to find evidence that they did that verifies that they did

[01:22:25]  Red: I I think I might stop you briefly enough to argue that I think the defense team is absolutely trying to refute it

[01:22:31]  Blue: That is true. That is a fair point. The defense team is the defense team is going to try to find evidence That this person could not have done it. Okay For the sake of argument, let’s take the point of view that this person that there is nothing there There is no alibi available, which is very common Right So what we’re really left with is that there is no way to refute that this person didn’t do it because they have no alibi But we’re we’re still going to have this standard of guilty innocent until proven guilty So we’re expecting something to take place We’re expecting there to be even though we know we’re never going to refute We’re never going to refute the theory that they did it And that’s impossible in fact in this case So what we’re going to do is we’re going to strengthen the theory. That’s there’s that word again And we’re going to find support. There’s that word again For the fact that this person Probably did it. There is that word again, right words that cause paparians to just Go, you know Angry with mad and say that’s all Bayesian, right? And yet that those aren’t terrible words in a courtroom case Right.

[01:23:45]  Blue: We we are looking for supporting evidence We are looking for something that kind of verifies in some sense that this person did it now I do think it is possible to take everything I just said where I’m intentionally wording it in ways that would get paparians mad And I think it is possible to come up with some way to put that in negative as terms I just did an episode on A defensive corroboration where I did claim there there are no Positiveistic words that you can’t then restate in a negativistic way, but sometimes it’s really inconvenient to do so

[01:24:21]  Green: I really loved what what the way you put that in that episode how you said that the You made the comparison to newtons laws versus general relativity where you know On a everyday basis it might be perfectly reasonable for a scientist to use newtons laws Just as it may be useful to talk about probabilities Right, but you know on a deeper More fundamental level if you really want to get into the nitty gritty newtons laws are wrong Right and real relativity is right. Just as critical rationalism is right. So That that kind of really rang true for me Yeah to parse out the difference just

[01:25:05]  Red: quickly maybe and just because you guys might be able to correct my understanding I never I that’s kind of how I’ve thought about some of the key points that popper made In regards to a lot of these bigger issues, which was uh very much akin to the newton relativity example Uh, it’s not that you can’t calculate say the the travel of an object Like an artillery shell or something using newtonian mechanics. You can you can do it You can do it you could do it the day before eddington took those pictures and you could do it the day after But the foundational explanation had to change Uh, and and so sort of as an analog I don’t know that popper said thou shalt not think inductively about anything that it never matters that it’s never useful That you’re never you know Going that those concepts are forever irrelevant I just understood him to mean that the broader picture the deeper thing that we’re doing is uh is something different

[01:26:04]  Blue: Yeah, that’s

[01:26:06]  Red: my

[01:26:06]  Blue: point of view too by the way and that was actually what I argued in my episode on corroboration I think sometimes it’s hard though like if I were to I gave the example of we invent a time machine And when we invent this time machine We claim that the time machine goes back in time and it follows exactly what david doigt says in fabric of reality We we create a new universe a new world Uh branching timeline and now we have this time machine that lets us move between the two worlds Okay, how can you say that this doesn’t strengthen the theory of many worlds interpretation of quantum physics If we’re now able to actually Test for these other worlds and show that they exist through verification, right? I mean, of course it does so I suggested if you want to Put this into a into a paparian framework of conjecture and refutation You have to give it some thought because it’s not obvious at first how to do it And I quoted david doigt how he would go about this which I thought was a really good answer from david doigt And he he suggested that In a case like this, you would have to understand it as There’s theories that don’t yet exist nascent conjectures of how to try to explain quantum physics without many worlds And now that you actually have another world you can see those all just died even though they aren’t even yet True theories And so to put it into a negativist framework Requires you to realize that you can refute a theory that doesn’t exist Which is a is a mouthful, right?

[01:27:40]  Blue: And I think that’s exactly correct though is that you can put it into a conjecture and refutation framework But that it is often quite difficult to figure out how to do so

[01:27:51]  Red: Um, I think that’s that’s really good and helpful. I and I agree completely. Yeah, absolutely

[01:27:57]  Blue: And I think something similar is going on with my court case example It’s outside the bounds of anything I can be like I’ve been wanting to do an episode where I talk about how to put court cases into A critical rationalist framework because I think you can right? But I intentionally just put it in a way that I think would be typical of how people would think of it And I don’t think they’re wrong. I think that when they put court cases in terms of reasonable doubt and How sure you are and you know, is there enough evidence that that there’s a high probability and I have Supporting evidence. I think that that’s a really useful way to speak and I’m not about to tell them Oh, that’s all wrong because that’s false for epistemology, right? I think that that’s a Super useful way to speak about court cases and I don’t think that any of those terms are going away anytime soon, right?

[01:28:47]  Red: No, and and I I agree. I think they’re if nothing else It’s it’s an intuitive way to use language And in in in some cases the bigger point is you want to especially in a legal setting You want you want to make sure that jurors understand their instructions, right? You want them to make Decisions in accordance with how the law says they should which is right in this case The only thing I would change in the thought experiment is I would argue that the conjecture Is that the person’s innocent meaning that’s the starting point You got to refute the conjecture that they didn’t do it because that’s where we’re starting And if the prosecution Does you know does a poor job then they’re going to fail to refute that conjecture They whether they’ve got they may have supporting evidence or not And then that’s another place where like you described. I think it’s perfectly cogent to talk about you know So if if this is an extremely bad You know example of bad evidence, but just imagine that you know part of the prosecution’s case was Well, look, we know we know this to be Certain that the defendant did not buy any international travel tickets They did not cross any either the Canadian or Mexican border During the on the night that this happened. So we know that the person was in the united states incapable of committing prime x Um, and this is part of our evidence. That’s not going to be enough to refute the argument that they’re innocent I would imagine

[01:30:16]  Blue: Yeah, I think that this is something that requires A lot of more careful analysis that we’re not going to probably get into in in in this episode I know david miller has written some excellent articles about this that I would like to cover maybe in a future podcast Um But I think it is entirely possible to take court cases and put them into a critical rationalist framework But I think it’s very counter -intuitive And you really have to give it some thought how to do it and that it just more naturally fits into a positivistic framework Um and that and and I think the reason why that’s true is for exactly what peter was quoting me on Because positivism isn’t entirely wrong. It’s it’s kind of a simplified version of critical rationalism that is like newtons It’s sometimes right and it’s sometimes wrong But it’s often easier to think of it in a more positivistic way because it kind of matches our intuitions in a lot of cases

[01:31:13]  Red: Sure Yeah, I don’t disagree. It’s fun. It’s fun to talk about too. I think it’s more than just uh It’s sort of a passive intellectual exercise. I think it is It’s really useful to try and think through these things because it clarifies at least for me Uh, it provides ever more clarity In how I’ll best to think about what I do. It’s my day job. It’s a scientist. So, uh, I enjoy All

[01:31:37]  Blue: right, brian. Thank you very much. I would love to have you on the show again sometime I I think that you’ve been one of our best guests and you’ve kind of I can see that The three of us kind of have really similar thoughts on a lot of things. It would be nice to get your take and just having access to a working scientist who’s working on these very thoughts In a real field where it is somewhat difficult to know how to apply popper’s epistemology to it I think that’s just phenomenal Well,

[01:32:07]  Red: it means a lot to me that you said that I really appreciate it and I will come back as often as you all will have Me uh, and at any point if you get bored with me, that’s perfectly understandable as well It happens to students all the time. So but but thank you. It really has been a pleasure and I appreciate you guys inviting me

[01:32:27]  Green: All right. Thank you. Thank you brian. This is wonderful. Thank you

[01:32:31]  Blue: The theory of anything podcast could use your help We have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others So others can enjoy it as well to the best of our knowledge We’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of david dutch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on apple podcasts This can usually be done right inside your podcast player Or you can google the theory of anything podcast apple or something like that Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on facebook or other social media to help get the word out If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that The first is via our podcast host site anchor. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands f o u r dash s t r a n d s There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations If you want to make a one -time donation go to our blog, which is four strands.org There is a donation button there that uses paypal. Thank you

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