Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability

Matjaž Leonardis has co-written a paper with David Deutsch about the Popper-Miller Theorem. In this episode, we talk about that as well as the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of scientific progress, and advice for young people who want to be polymaths. Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/fTfDZO-p5Fo. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-matja%C5%BE-leonardis-science-identity-and-probability/id1516093381?i=1000488832109, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SDs2yo6XqaFzTUozVkWU6?si=RAh5tBOXT12nMK3zH0cZBw, or any other podcast platform. Podcast website here. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/matjaz-leonardis Follow Matjaž's excellent Twitter https://twitter.com/MatjazLeonardis. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp for updates on future episodes! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Lunar Society. Sorry it's been so long since the Tyler Cowen interview. I want to thank all of you for joining this podcast so early on. I especially want to thank those of you who have been sharing these episodes on Twitter and other platforms. Since this is a new podcast, almost all of the views and listens I get here are because of your retweets and endorsements. So please continue sharing this podcast if you enjoy it. I also want to thank those of you who have bought me books and equipment off my Amazon wishlist. Scott Hamilton bought me the very microphone I'm recording off of. John Beadie donated Nassim Tsev's new book. Someone else donated Charles Murray's new book. And someone gifted me a $120 Raspberry Pi kit for embedded systems programming. If you're one of the people who anonymously donated, please DM or email me so I have a chance to thank you personally.

• 0:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  And to Scott and John, I'm really grateful for your gift. I also want to let you know that I'll be writing daily at dwarkesh.substack.com. So please sign up there to receive my blog via email. The newest post I have out is titled "If Prediction Markets or Policies Were Legal", based on Robin Hanson's idea of a futarchy. In fact, I just interviewed him for a podcast, so expect that in the next week.

• 1:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Machos Leonardis. Machos has co-written a paper with David Deutsch about the problem of Miller theorem. And we get into that, as well as the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of scientific progress, and advice to young people who want to be polymaths. Machos is one such, as you will see. He's a fascinating person that I've had the pleasure of getting to know. And he has a broad range of interesting ideas, which we get into. So without further ado, here's Machos Leonardis. Okay, Machos, you have co-written a paper with David Deutsch about Bayes' theorem. But before we get into that, let's talk about the big picture questions. Science, what is it? And is it somewhat of a confusion to even talk about it distinctly from other disciplines?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Well, so my view on that subject is that is that often a lot of a lot of talk about science ends up being quite counterproductive. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as science, but I definitely think that that sort of that people identify with science too much. They they they wonder whether what they are doing is science. They they think they are scientists and wonder what is it that they should do in their capacity as scientists? And I think that often has a counterproductive effect on on on basically what they do.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Now, one interesting thing to note is that is that, you know, the the name scientist is actually an early 90th century invention. It was traced back to, I think, to to to professors at, I think, Trinity College in Cambridge. And it's and, you know, people were able to do science before that quite well. And so so one of the problems that I see, I guess, in that in that respect is just that people people perhaps think about, you know, what what is a scientist and, sorry, who is a scientist and what is science a bit too much?

• 3:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  But I don't know the history here. Do people not consider themselves natural philosophers before then?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  There there has definitely been sort of names for for for this role. The the so so what I just sort of think about it is that people people have always thought about the natural world, though. Right? So people have always, you know, tried to understand, you know, how you know, how how machines work, how nature works, how sort of everything does. And and they often did that without, you know, ever becoming conscious of the idea that they were doing anything special or that they are playing a special role by doing so. And, you know, they were they were able to sort of do it just fine. And one of the things that, you know, at some point that obviously changed.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  You know, this sort of idea that that one is engaged in some sort of a special activity when one is trying to understand nature. And, you know, there'd be kind of a special social role for that, like all of that obviously has to develop. But but it does seem to be the case that you can reach a better understanding of the natural world without it.

• 4:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And therefore.

• 4:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  This question.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 4:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sorry, go ahead.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Oh, no, and therefore there is a question about, you know, whether it is actually helpful.

• 4:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, well, the identity of scientist is not that useful. Then why do we have universities that we consider to be special places? And we employ people with tax dollars to do special things that, I mean, clearly they're not doing construction or, um, you know, building archers or something like that.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Hmm, so, so like, there is an activity, i.e. trying to understand natural world, that seems to work better when it is supported of sort of both kind of, that it is, that is institutionally and culturally supported. Um, so, you know, it is useful to have institutions that, you know, kind of keep all the relevant books at the same place and kind of get some of the same people, um, um, you know, at the same place that sort of organize, you know, events and sort of where people can kind of sort of meet each other. Um, and, and I think that that, you know, that, that, so I'm not disputing that, um, there is an activity that is sort of worthy of, of, of being supported.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Um, but, but whether that sort of particular way of looking at that activity is, is the right one, um, is, is, is less clear.

• 5:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, so you do identify there's a special role for universities and they're doing a distinctive activity. Well, if it's not science they're doing, how would you describe what the thing they're doing is?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Right, so, so, well, okay, so, so perhaps to illustrate this, right? One, um, needn't, needn't think of this activity in a unified way. So, for example, like, imagine that we had an institution and in this institution there would be, you know, somebody who was interested in, you know, liquid helium. And, uh, he would be writing about it and talking with all the people that were interested in it. And then you would have another person and that person, um, would be, you know, interested in, in, you know, the way stars form and, and their, you know, evolution. And that person would be sort of, you know, again, writing about this, talking with other people about it. And, you know, you could have so on for, for just a bunch of other things. Now, you can easily have an institution that would be sort of supporting all of. These people in that in that endeavor.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  But you know that that you know, but now, for example, if if one if one were to just kind of stop there, right? It's it's not possible yet at that stage, you know, to sort of say, okay, well, well, all of these people are are engaged in this, you know, unified activity, you know, called science. And oh, are some of them really doing it or or not, right? Everybody is just is just, you know, one one person is doing this, one person is doing that, you know, one person is doing the third thing. So perhaps, I mean, an interesting, right, comparison might be um um for for kind of the the particular view that I have. It's just like, you know, um, you know, um, like like people have this idea of an entrepreneur, right?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, in in a certain sense, um, you know, and and all of these entrepreneurs are kind of trying to construct different companies, right? But nobody, nobody, nobody is kind of asking the question, well, you know, is any one of these people actually entrepreneur-ing, right? That that is not a conversation that ever arises. So it is in that sense that that I think that um that you can have an institution that supports that activity. But you don't need to like understand it in this particular way that that science is often understood.

• 7:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  And so what's counterproductive about the current understanding of science and scientists?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Right, so so one problem um with this idea is that the idea of sort of science and scientists comes with this idea that there is this particular method. In other words, um, that that, you know, one that one is somehow doing something more other than just being engaged. You know, with a with a particular problem or question and pursuing it, you know, wherever it might lead. There is this idea that there is a specific method that that one ought to use to think about this particular question, rather than just, you know, where where sort of the the question naturally leads you. And I think that that um. This attitude or this idea can often stop people from doing sensible things that

• 8:36Speaker 01

  would otherwise, that would help with pursuing their problem, right? So, you know, the thinking is that you need to pursue the various questions with a specific method as opposed to just where kind of the logic of the problem itself leads you. And I'm not saying that this actually affects everybody or that this is a sort of an across the board thing, but it is sort of an argument that often features. The current conception of this, therefore, you know, as I said sort of before, kind of allows you to make criticism of somebody, you know, you can say, well, are they really doing this thing or not, which is not a thing you could really do, you know, where people

• 9:17Speaker 01

  just sort of thinking about specific issues and what they did was understood in that way. And in general, I do think that like making, you know, becoming conscious of what one is doing and, you know, kind of being, and sort of classifying it or telling yourself the story about it is one thing that is known, you know, in several other fields to sometimes lead to problems, you know, hence the term self-consciousness and it being sort of productive, it being deemed counterproductive in many areas.

• 9:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  But let me make the counter-argument. There is a specific method, or at least a family of methods, right? We have Pauper, we have, you know, falsifiability, testability, and, you know, we privilege these over other methods we could be using, like myth-making and so on. So what's wrong with somebody understanding their position in institution as to understand the world through a specific family of methods?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Well, I would, perhaps, funny you mentioned Pauper there, because I would actually dispute that premise. He wrote this, I mean, there is, I think, a very nice set of undergraduate lectures that has been recorded from him, where he says that he was, I think, a professor of scientific method at the London School of Economics or something like that. And he says in that lecture that he is a professor of a subject that he thinks does not exist.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  His student Feierabend, I think, actually wrote a book Against Method, which is yet another kind of philosopher of science arguing against that idea. And now, it is true that there are certain, I guess, patterns of thought that are more conducive to, that seem to at least be more conducive to understanding the natural world than others. But I think that that is still like, what, what patterns work? You know, how one thinks about them and so on.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  All of these things are kind of more of a great mystery than an exact science, to put it like that.

• 11:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  So then, to paraphrase you, let me just see if I'm understanding you correctly. It's that scientists should consider certain methods better than others, but they shouldn't identify themselves with some of them?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, okay, that's, I'm not sure if that is sort of paraphrasing it exactly as I see it, because it's like, it is very unclear if one is ever, is ever using a method. Because, you know, like, people, as I said at the beginning, people have been thinking about the natural world without being conscious of it in any way. And, you know, it is, you know, like, thoughts are constantly arising in the mind, right? And it's, it's, it often feels like a bit of a stretch to say that, you know, all these different thoughts one is having are arising as a result of a method, as opposed to just arising.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  There is a certain level of ambiguity that I think sometimes occurs there.

• 12:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  So people have been trying to solve problems for a long time, but only recently, well, I would argue that only recently. For maybe like the past 500 years, they've been very productive in understanding the natural world. And it does seem to be because of a family of methods, right? So doesn't the case of the success of the Enlightenment lend credence to the idea that certain methods are to be privileged and are more productive?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Well, I do not exactly have a view on that, on that, on that subject. For example, there, to be honest, I just sort of don't know. I kind of have various passing thoughts on that issue. But, I mean, for example, there is this sort of question, there is this sort of narrative about the importance of the Enlightenment. And it's, it's, it's not exactly obvious if that, to me, if that narrative is in fact true, or if that narrative is more of a fiction. And, you know, there are, there are strong proponents for one of that positions and there are strong proponents for the other. And what they have in common, ironically, is that I think that they both sort of agree

• 13:41Speaker 01

  that there was something very important about the Enlightenment. Because there is perhaps yet another third explanation where, you know, it was, it was, you know, it, you know, all of this had nothing to do, to do with anything else. Maybe it was just, you know, economic progress that, that allowed for, you know, like, all this thought to be produced at a time. Like, it's very, very difficult to sort of figure out exactly how causality works with, with most of these things. But, but to this idea that it was due to, to a change in method, I mean, like, well, that's, like, a lot of people at the time had that idea, but a lot of people kind of subsequently criticized that idea by, by sort of pointing out, well, I don't know, maybe something did change in the way we thought about things, but, but nobody can really understand that change, right?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Because a huge part of that idea was that, was that, you know, what is that, is that, what was this idea of reason, really? That, that somehow or other, reason is the way to, to understand the natural world. And what, for example, Hume and other skeptics subsequently pointed out is just that, well, like, like this, like, this can't possibly really work as, as, you know, you guys are imagining it. Because, for example, I mean, as Hume pointed out, this is kind of the, the famous problem of induction. You know, there is no way to kind of proceed logically, i.e. by reason, from experience to, you know, the, the, the celebrated, you know, general theories of the Enlightenment, such as Newton's theory and such like.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  And, so, I do not know what, what opinion exactly I have on that issue, but these are some of my thoughts.

• 15:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, that was a very interesting answer. Speaking of induction, let's get into the paper you co-wrote with David that's coming out soon. So, do you want to describe it?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Oh sure, so we, we wrote a paper on something called the Popper-Miller theorem. Popper-Miller theorem was a theorem that Popper, as we previously mentioned in this podcast, and David Miller, basically, they published a short letter in Nature in 1983, where they presented this, this very kind of short paradox, where they basically claimed that,

• 15:48Speaker 01

  that, the way they explained it was the idea that probabilistic support is not inductive. That is quite vague, and, and this was conceded by, by many people, kind of subsequently. But the basic idea is, is something like, so basically, there is this, there is this idea that somehow, and this idea is very much a part of common sense, and was a part of various attempts to build an inductive logic at the time, which is simply this idea that, that, that evidence somehow can first support on general theories. And figuring out the right model of that, of that support, of how this sort of support works, you know, has been kind of one of the challenges that people have basically been

• 16:31Speaker 01

  trying, trying to figure out at the time. And one of the ideas was that basically probability is, is, you know, probability was considered as one of such possible sort of support measures. And basically, what their, what their theorem aimed to show was that, was that this, that this probabilistic support, that evidence sort of confers on theories, i.e., you know, a piece of evidence comes in and the probability of a particular theory, you know, increases by 10%, that that 10% increase can't really be understood as in any way being due to that evidence conferring some kind of inductive support on that theory. And the way they made the argument is that they basically said, they basically identified two propositions.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  They said, "Look, this theory relative to this evidence, like, really, this first proposition is a kind of a, the deductive part of the theory relative to the evidence, and this other part of the theory is the inductive part of the theory relative to the evidence." And they showed that the evidence always decreases the probability of this inductive part. Now- There was a lot of subsequent commentary on this result. And the main points that people made were, well, you know, the main points of dispute were, "Well, in what sense is this proposition that they said was the inductive part? In what sense does it capture all of this theory that goes beyond the evidence," as they put it?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  And then the other issue was just, you know, because there is this vague notion of inductive support and what exactly that means. And so that was another source of objections. And I think that the conversation has in many ways moved on from there. But we thought that that argument is still interesting. We found a couple of other ways of explaining it. And I think they present a very interesting challenge to this idea of trying to use Bayesian reasoning to either build an AGI or for various other purposes. And we thought it would be a very interesting thing to present.

• 18:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, did this theorem fit a broader theme in Popper's work?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Well, it sort of did, right? So the basic idea that Popper had, that I think came out, this theorem, I think, came out of the same way of thinking about this, was basically just this idea that, so he was interested in the idea of logical content of a theory. There was this idea that just like you could have this probability measure that you assign to theories, you can assign a content measure. So the idea is that some theories say more than others. And the question was, can you construct a measure of that kind? And one of the interesting observations in thinking about that measure is simply the fact that the constraints or the rules it has to obey are exactly the same as the probability calculus, basically.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So in a certain sense, you can always interpret some assignment of probabilities, as really being a statement of, as he put it, "a degree of logical weakness." So if I say that one theory is more likely than another theory, there is always this perfectly consistent interpretation where what I'm actually just saying is that, if I say that this theory is more likely than that theory, I can say this theory says less than this theory. That was kind of the idea of it. And, um, and, and basically, um, what the, the reason therefore here, I think, kind of became skeptical of these probabilistic approaches to knowledge is simply the fact

• 20:19Speaker 01

  that, um, is simply the fact that as he saw it, um, and I think that there are some reasons to, to kind of think that this is in fact how people think, um, is that, is that what people actually want, what they believe in, what they seek are not kind of these sort of tautology-like, contentless, but likely theories, as it were, but kind of these incredibly informative, um, and, and therefore, um, you know, informative explanatory and therefore kind of less likely theories. Um, and if you want kind of an example of the fact that, that people do seem to think about that way, right, there is something known as the conjunction fallacy, um, that would seem to sort of support that.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  So, um, there is this famous experiment, I think it was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, um, which was, I think, the sort of case of Linda. So, um, the, you know, in this, in this experiment, you're told about a woman and you're given a bunch of information that would kind of, you know, that are kind of stereotypically associated with being a feminist. And then the question is, well, is it more likely that Linda is A, a banker, or B, a banker and a feminist? And a lot of people pick option B, even though, um, the probability calculus kind of tells you that, that, that, you know, option A has to be more likely than option B. And so the question can be, well, why that is? Um, but I think that this tendency that he talked about sort of explains this phenomenon, right?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  The second fact explains the facts you were initially given, but option A, as I called it, doesn't. Um, and, and I think that this is sort of a part of a general theme where, where people really do, um, you know, sort of look for, and as I said, believe in explanatory

• 22:04Speaker 01

  General theories, not by, by, um, not this sort of content, you know, not, not kind of the most likely theory. I mean, there are several European languages, I think the, the German, um, German and Slovenian are, are the two that I know, where I think that, um, like if you were to translate the, the word for probability into English, it would be something like believability. Um, and, uh, and, uh, I, I think that, you know, if you, if you interpret probability in that way, sort of, um, I, I think that, you know, the, the believability of explanatory theories is always higher than the believability of, of these sort of, uh, um, less likely theories, and therefore believability isn't really probability.

• 22:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, and can you explain why explanatory theories, uh, should be preferred?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Um, well, I'm, I'm not saying that they should be, I, I'm, you know, um, I, I do, I do like explanatory theories. I find them interesting to think about and, and kind of much more fun to engage with. Um, I mean, I can, I can give you his arguments for it, um, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with them, but...

• 23:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Actually, I'm more interested in where you might disagree.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Oh, where, where might I disagree? Um, well, um, well, e, e, there, so, so for example, he pointed, so, so, so the, so there is this interesting question, right? Of what exactly is the role of this universal theories? Like, why, why do we have them? Why do we think about them? Why do we try to improve them and so on? Um, and his argument was that, that, that, that, that people actually, his argument was actually quite psychological. It was that people seem to have this need for regularity. Um, and, and, you know, if you put them in an environment, um, without regularity, uh, people kind of go mad or, or, you know, at least, uh, uh, you know, kind of, kind of, kind of invent regularity out of thin air. Um, and I think that's a very interesting argument.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  I, you know, e, e, like, there, there is this interesting question of why, if, if this is true, um, I can't quite exactly see why this need for regularity exists. Um, but it is, it is something that, that, that I think, um, is, is, uh, is a... Is a kind of worthy of exploration. On the other hand, I think it's another thing that is great about explanatory theories is that is that they allow, and I think that this was another point that you would make, is that is that they sort of allow for progress, right? Because it's only if you kind of create this universal explanatory theories and you go out there, you know, you will eventually find that that something about it doesn't quite work. So you will replace it with another, and then another one after that.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  But what is kind of happening in that process is that your is that your kind of knowledge of the world is increasing in a way it wouldn't if you just accumulated experiences. Because, you know, if you were just accumulating experience, you might never go out there and try, you know, things that your universal theory says you should do, and therefore discover that it is false. And another thing that can happen in this process of of is that is that kind of various kinds of truths can accumulate in this in these general theories that are not present just in the experience alone. And so I get I I'm not sure if this thing that I just said is his argument or something

• 25:22Speaker 01

  that it is or not, but but it is, I think, another reason why explanatory theories play such an interesting role in in in life in general.

• 25:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  I completely agree with everything there, but you didn't explain where you disagree with Popper.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I I said that that that, you know, it's it's it's somewhat unclear to me that this thing that I mentioned about the need for regularity. I I'm not sure if it exists. It's plausible that it exists, but if it does, I don't I don't quite understand how it works. So that's that's kind of that.

• 25:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, let me ask about being polymathic. So this paper clearly pulls from a lot of disciplines, and I think a lot of the work you do generally does. What advice do you have to a young person who's trying to be a polymath?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, the first piece of advice is is that is that I would give is that you should never take advice from me. The second piece of the the second thing I would say, though, is is a it actually relates so so.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Again, this sort of relates to just a particular problem that I think I I I think people are naturally interested in everything. And it is only through through, again, it's actually it's actually very similar to the thing we talked about at the beginning. I think that I think that the same the same phenomenon that happens with the way people think about science sort of happens with learning. So, you know, people learn all all their life. You you and in fact, people learn all the time, like you interact with information all the time. It changes you, but you never think you never consciously think of changing yourself by doing that. Or, you know, uh, trying to change it.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  It's only in very special circumstances that that you kind of try to think of yourself in that way. And I think a lot of what happens when one tries to do that is actually quite counterproductive. Like, for example, there are a lot of ideas that that that if you want to learn something, you can't just do it through osmosis. You have to be very, very systematic about it. And I think that is basically completely false. I think that, and again, this sort of leads people in in this sort of very, very counterproductive direction, where they think they need to study the fundamentals of something. And then there are, like, first of all, they think they need to study a subject. Then you think, OK, first thing, you just study the fundamentals, then the intermediate level, then the advanced levels. And all of these levels are fiction. There there is sort of none of that there.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  And all of these ideas were actually developed to, oh, oh, they have they have always been developed to solve a particular problem or advance a particular need. And and I think what is what is, you know, most, if one wants to just have broad interests, I think the most important thing is is to just, you know, pursue whatever you're interested in, not be afraid or think that you can't understand it. And paradoxically, not not actually trying to achieve any particular change in yourself, but rather just sort of going going where the story goes. Reading history is perhaps perhaps sort of helpful because because

• 28:30Speaker 01

  a lot of books are kind of written with the With these ideas that I think are misconceptions in mind.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  But, you know, there is a substantial. But history of things often gets around that because. Like, you know, as I said, like every single one, every single thing you see in a textbook wasn't written to be put in a textbook. Wasn't developed so that somebody could learn it. It was it was created by somebody who was trying to do something or understand something. And it was useful in a particular context, and that's why people adopted it, and that's why it eventually ended up in that textbook. But what often happens is that then that context goes away and all that remains is a textbook. And so you are left with all of these irrelevant seeming information. That was actually relevant to somebody at some point, but is no longer relevant to to anybody.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  That reads it, or at least not immediately relevant to how they approach it. So that are some of my basic thoughts on like what I sometimes see kind of. Go weird, but I think people, you know, polymath is not something you learn to be, it's something you unlearn to be, as some people would put it.

• 29:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Awesome. That's very liberating advice. But let me ask you this. Should you just, should a young person just be focused on learning what they find interesting? Or as, as you mentioned, like people are trying to find solutions to the problem situations they're in. Should they be purposefully trying to identify problem situations in existing knowledge?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so so I think that.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  When it comes to that, I think. My impression at least is that the most important thing is to connect. With other people or groups of people that are doing something. Because there you will, you know, again, find find something that you can contribute to. As well as, you know, sort of get support for doing so and and so on. I think that that that is sort of very much. An unsolved problem as a thing to to kind of do at scale. As I think we we talked about at some point. Like, there is this idea that you could create a kind of a.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  There is often this idea that that that one could easily create kind of a list of all unsolved problems in a given field. And just put it on the internet. And many people kind of think, well, this this seems so simple, like, why doesn't anybody ever do that? And I think that is that is actually incredibly difficult to do. I think that the kinds of information that you would have to put

• 31:07Speaker 01

  online is just incredibly, it's very, very unclear how one does that. And the key, the key thing is that, is that, the key thing to realize is that, well, first of all, that, there really is no such thing as a as an unsolved problem, I think, as conventionally understood. There are just a bunch of people and, you know, like, one can form a view that that creating something would be valuable to them. It often won't be valuable to everybody, it will only be valuable to a subsection of those people. And those people might not actually know in advance that that's what they would want. And for that reason, it's actually quite difficult to sort of put,

• 31:49Speaker 01

  you know, that that seems to be a kind, that that is kind of, it's a difficult thing to kind of put online for that reason.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah.

• 32:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, interesting. So, but if you're, uh, but if you're a young person who needs to connect to people to, um, who are solving the right problems or about to solve the right problems, but you yourself don't know what the right problems are because you haven't connected to them yet. I mean, how do you solve that circle?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Right, so I think that that, that, that is sort of quite a challenge. And as I said, I, I think I'm terrible at this. There are people who I think are, are sort of, because I, I, I think, you know, it is very much the case, as you sort of said, that, that, that the whole thing has a bit of a sort of chicken and egg problem to it, right? Because the whole idea is, well, you can't really contribute anything valuable because you don't know anything about, you know, what these people's lives are like, what you can contribute to it. And on the other hand, it's kind of difficult to join the conversation because you don't have anything yet to contribute to it, right? And so, the, the, there are these sort of all kinds of idiosyncratic ways that, that I think this, this sort of happens and gets solved.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  But, but there isn't anything, it's not an impossible problem to solve, but, but it does require, I think, quite a bit of an experimentation. I don't think I'm, I'm the best person at this by, by any stretch. But these are, I guess, are just some general thoughts in that.

• 33:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, so then, young people connecting to mentors who are solving the right problems. Is this very hard? Is this impossible almost?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Um, I, I, I actually, no, I, I don't think, I don't think so at all. I think that the, the, the main problem is just that, that it is somewhat idiosyncratic. Right. So, so you, you cannot just sort of give, give a, give a, give a universal answer. But I think that the, the, it's definitely not the case that, that the world is hostile to it. I think people are very sympathetic to attempts to do that. You know, and, and, you know, as I'm, as, as basically you illustrate, I think a, a lot of, a lot of that is very, very possible.

• 33:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  And Oh, there's tremendous goodwill for young people out there.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  So, so that's, yeah, I, I have the sort of the same impression. And so, so, so, yeah, I don't want to, like, I think, I think one of the worst things, perhaps, perhaps the reason I sort of bring this up is just because, I think people often just lack awareness of this. They, they, they kind of lack the awareness of the fact that that is kind of the main challenge. Or at least a thing that, a thing that one ought to do.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And, uh, yeah, I guess for that, for that reason, I, I think it is sort of worth mentioning.

• 34:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  On that hopeful and optimistic note, Mustass, thank you for reading on the show. This is very fascinating.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.