Father Of Quantum Computing: How To Think Like A Genius - David Deutsch - #1164

David Deutsch is a British physicist, a pioneering researcher in quantum computation, and author. Expect to learn how David has changed his views on the limits of human potential in recent years, why people should have an optimistic view of the world, which current problem most people are unnecessarily pessimistic about right now, what the largest issues are in modern education, why AGI will not pose a great threat to humans, what makes for a good life and much more… Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) How Is Knowledge Created? (04:19) Do We Misunderstand Being Wrong? (10:01) Why We Should Never Aspire to Be Certain (21:29) Will We Ever Solve the Fermi Paradox? (23:53) Is Optimism the Most Rational Worldview? (28:41) Why Does Pessimism Masquerade as Sophistication? (31:42) Should We Be Afraid of AI? (37:27) Why LLMs Can’t Take Over the World (44:08) What Is Creativity? (48:05) Is Our Education System Built on a Mistake? (53:35) How Should We Reinvent Education? (55:27) Can Too Much Discipline Hold You Back? (01:03:24) The Philosophy Behind a Good Life (01:09:16) What Is David Working On? Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left and you can get yours now at chriswilliamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So if you're a fan of everything modern wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland. Chris Williamson.live. I'm kind of fascinated in your worldview from a personal perspective, from a person's perspective. You know, we can talk about how important it is for a society or for civilization or for humanity as a whole to think about the importance of optimism and our capacity to solve problems and stuff like that. I'm kind of interested in how an individual takes that as well.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  I think that might be an interesting tension. Obviously, we've had all of this most recent stuff about anthropic researchers leaving and over fears of AI and then superintelligence and recursive stuff. I don't know if you're interested in that or if you're kind of a little bit bored of it. I've been talking about it a lot. I'm also interested in how your worldview's changed over the last 15 years, since the last book, Human Potential and stuff like that. So we can, we can start off and then scurry down whatever rabbit holes sound interesting if that seems good to you.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  Wonderful.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  By the way, I think I agree with that maxim. So, you know, whenever someone doesn't understand you, it's your fault, not theirs. Unless they're a golden retriever.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  Are you telling me that I've got a get out of jail free card today?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you're human, yes.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  Say more on that. Why, why is it the fault of misunderstanding? Why does that lie in an odd direction to?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  So I'm, as you will know, I'm a follower of the philosopher Karl Popper. And he has a theory of knowledge, which is, in my view, streets ahead of everyone else in the 20th century. He, he's, he's, he's a strange, strange kind of reputation because he's very well-known, highly respected, you know, people always put him on the list of the 10 top philosophers or something like that. And in science especially, they always talk about Popper's criterion for distinguishing science from philosophy or from pseudoscience.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  And yet, his actual philosophy is not very well-understood. And, and one of the tenets of his philosophy is that there is only one way of creating knowledge. The details are different, but knowledge as created by the process of evolution, as created by a scientist, a mathematician, a child learning to speak their first language, those processes are all more alike than they are different. The differences are pretty inessential.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And in particular, the, the process of learning something new, like learning a new law of physics that one has discovered, or learning an existing piece of knowledge, like from somewhere, someone else, that is all the same process mentally. In all of them, the, the knowledge that is learned comes from within the learner. So you're, you're learning something, you can't download it like a computer. You have to guess what the other person means.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  And at first you will guess wrong, and so you will have to test those guesses and, and so on. So the, the, if, if that process goes wrong, it is because the, the, the teacher or the professor or...

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  Communicator, yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the communicator has not pitched it to meet your problem situation. So, yes, go ahead.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  Why, what is it that most people misunderstand about being wrong? I think we all have this aversion to making mistakes, to not understanding, to putting errors into the way that we understand the world, or how it is that we're interpreting something else. Is there a better framing for how people should think about wrongness?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yes. So as Popper said, I'm gonna have to stop me quoting him every minute or two.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  We're all alike in our infinite ignorance, or longer.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  We may all know different things, different pieces of knowledge, but in our infinite ignorance, we are all alike. So this all comes from the idea that since there's an infinite distance to go, and we all have different finite amounts of knowledge, we are all at, like I say in my book, we're all at the beginning of infinity. We're only ever at the beginning. And so we, we have something in common with everyone else who is also at the beginning.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And, and to hold oneself up as an authority is a philosophical mistake, as well as a, what can you call it? A sociological mistake or a cultural mistake. It's, it's, it's a power play, rather than a participation in the growth of knowledge which we should all be participating in.

• 6:01Chris Williamson?

  How should someone hold strong convictions if we all kind of need to remember that we can be completely mistaken at all times and we're vast in our ignorance and partial in our knowledge?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, as you're suggesting here, it's, it's a psychological matter. So we should not be looking for certainty. We should be looking to correct errors. So when, when, sometimes when people say, I'm certain about something, it, it means that they have investigated all the possible ways it could be different and they satisfied themselves that those are all wrong and they have their reasons and they, but more often, certainty is regarded as, as a virtue in, in, in past times.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Faith, obedience, that sort of state of mind was regarded as virtuous. And people judge not only each other, but themselves, according to how much of that they had. Now, in modern times, especially with the growth of knowledge accelerating more and more in the last couple of hundred years, everyone's had the experience of, well, every, every adult that's, has had the experience of being proved wrong about something that they were sure was right, or something happened that they were sure would never happen.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  That, that's, and so one should infer from that experience, people don't, but one should infer from that experience, that the subjective sensation of being certain is no guide to the truth. It's, it's no guide at all. And neither is, and this is a bit even harder to like internalize, neither is the extent of knowledge or ignorance, because somebody can be very ignorant or even very malevolent, and yet on a particular thing, they might have the truth and you might not.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  So it's no good saying, that's a bad person, I won't listen to them, because you might be missing the, the one truth that would save you.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So again, like I say in the book, if your enemy says that he's going to come and kill you, it might be advisable to believe your enemy when you disbelieve your friend who says, oh, don't mind him, he's just, the bark is worse than his bite. So you see, it has nothing, it has nothing to do with being knowledgeable, it has nothing to do with being benevolent. We're all alike in our fallibility. So the only way to judge ideas is not by someone's authority, or by one's own authority,

• 9:14Speaker 01

  or by how sure one is, but only by the criterion of whether you have a good explanation for why that truth is, has had its errors corrected better than all the other truths you've heard or can think of.

• 9:32Chris Williamson?

  I can imagine a situation where this, this becomes, or at least it feels to an individual, very effortful to go through the entire working of the equation in order to arrive at the truth, as opposed to using the shortcuts, as opposed to saying, well, this person seems to be from an illustrious background, and they have been right about other things before, seemingly, or other people seem to respect their opinion, or they're saying it with a level of fervor that implies that they know what they're talking about.

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  What is a practical way for people to not take half of the afternoon to decide which sandwich they want, or which would be a more optimal yogurt to purchase? How can people sort of apply this to life without it becoming clunky and slowing them down?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  So, so we, we have a theory about situations that we're in. You know, you talk about sandwiches, so I go into town and buy a sandwich from, from a sandwich shop. And how do I know it's not poisoned? How, how do I know it's not off? How do I know that, that I haven't been handed the wrong sandwich and so on? Well, as you say, if I went back to first principles to work all that out, it would take all afternoon and I would be starving to death by the time I ate anything. So the rational thing to do, as I said, is to form a theory.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I have a theory about how chains of sandwich shops work, how, how they are regulated, for example, by the government, or by the market, or the shop may have a particular ethos that I think they really do have, rather than are pretending and so on. In the case where I can't say that, then I will have to use different criteria. And in that particular case, I myself would not buy a sandwich unless, unless I had those, that kind of history and that, that kind of idea of where this is coming from, where

• 11:44Speaker 01

  it's coming from intellectually, as well as where it's coming from physically in mind. So you don't, you don't have to go through the whole thing, because in short, not only can I, am I able to criticize ideas myself, I'm able to formulate and criticize ideas about other people. It's just that when I formulate an idea about, about the, the knowledge of, you know, the doctor, or, or the, the airline engineers who, who prepared the airplane that I'm going

• 12:25Speaker 01

  to fly on, the, the, I don't go by their reputation, I go by that theory. And a small fact can destroy a large reputation. Like, if, if I'm due to fly, and then I read in the newspaper in the morning that that airline has had a scandal where their engineers have, have been shoddy in preparing the plane, I may well not fly. Even though I may also think that the chance of the plane going wrong with me on it are actually tiny, but you know, maybe now they're only one in a thousand, and ideally, I'd like it to be one in a million.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  But I could be wrong, always.

• 13:16Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean, is certainty something that we should ever aspire to?

• 13:21Speaker 01

  No, we should aspire not to have any.

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  Should we aspire to uncertainty then?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, I mean, if you want a, a life of scientific research, then it's highly desirable that you enjoy the sensation of being baffled, of, of being in a state of conflict, of thinking, well, now it looks like this, this is true, but it can't be true. And that sensation is, for example, what, what attracts me to, to, to scientific research. I, I don't think one should even aspire to believe anything. I think belief is a, is a corrupt kind of category that has come down to us from, from

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Plato, and, and later from, from Christianity, and Islam, and so on. Most religions don't, don't value belief. They, they value ritual and conformity and ways of life. Belief was something introduced by Christianity. And it's rather weird, if you think about it, as Percy Shelley said, in the, in the,

• 14:38Speaker 01

  in the essay for which he got expelled from Oxford University, he pointed out that you, you can't believe or disbelieve something by an act of will. It's got to become via your reason. Therefore, calling disbelief a, an immoral thing doesn't make sense.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, do you know Oscar Wilde's idea of the Oxford manner? Have you come across this?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Don't think so, no.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful. It's just this one, one line, he refers to the Oxford manner as the ability to play gracefully with ideas, rather than sort of falling into violent or rigid opinions. And I think in my world, which is significantly less salubrious than academia, but maybe just as cutthroat and as much backbiting, the internet is really quick to show its own smarts by pointing out the flaws of others. And one of the problems that I've found is that the ability to put on a hypothetical

• 15:47Chris Williamson?

  hat, or in my parlance, a bro-scientist hat, look, I'm just, I'm trying to play gracefully with ideas, please give me enough degrees of freedom here to maybe be wrong. But because, how do you say, like, production and publication of ideas are one and the same on the internet, so you're coming up with things in real time, and then they're kind of broadcast out into the world, which means there is no, there is no scratch pad, there is no whiteboard that's not publicly available. The whiteboard and the lecture kind of become one and the same. And that means, that's been lost, at least in a way that a lot of people consume ideas and, and understand information and sort of see the debate go on. And I get the sense that kind of what's happened over the last decade or so is a

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  slow increase in the seductivity of certainty and a derogation of uncertainty, or incongruence, or, you know, like, a lack of coherence or something like that, because it becomes a target immediately for people on the internet, or, or critics, or naysayers, or enemies, or whatever, to kind of point the finger, look, he doesn't know that much about this thing, because he was pontificating and playing in, trying to play gracefully with ideas. Therefore, that means that he must be wrong about da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, as well, which is, I guess in one way, we could call this weaponized uncertainty, that

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  it is being used as a tool to kind of dismiss someone as a wider, a wider thinker, as opposed to, hey, like, this is cool, like, he's prepared to, I mean, he missed the mark with that, but it's fun, he's, he's able to try and play gracefully with ideas. I thought that kind of related here.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Ideally, Twitter or X is the ideal medium for conjecture, for just throwing ideas out and then having them criticized and come back to you and so on. But because of the phenomenon you're talking about, you can't really do that. And I, I have long ago stopped doing that on Twitter. So I, I think twice and three times and four times before putting something on Twitter, on X. And one thing that's possible to, it's possible to take a middle ground and say, I either ask it as a question, does anyone think so and so is true?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Or you could say, I guess so and so might be true. Or if so and so were true, then it might, it might answer this other question.

• 18:28Chris Williamson?

  Look at the throat-clearing land acknowledgement that we need to do before we actually put an idea out in a desperate attempt to dampen its impact.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, well, I, I think it's, it's inevitable. I mean, there, there are plenty of other places to, to publish conjectures.

• 18:48Chris Williamson?

  The dinner table, maybe.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yes, in private or in a private chat or in a more public thing where one labels it as conjecture. For example, I have just, I'm just finishing a book on the Fermi paradox or the Fermi problem. And I have, I have some conjectures there, which I think are, well, it's slightly strange. I think they're possible, they're possible solutions to the Fermi problem. But I am sure, certain, you know, which I shouldn't be, that they are not true.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  But I just would like to put them out there in the form, look how easy it is to make up ideas about this and for them to be wrong. That's the idea. So, so I've written it as a science fiction story set in another universe, not in our universe. So I don't have to answer for the discrepancies between this universe and our universe. So that, I just mentioned that because that's one of, one of many ways one can get criticism of conjectures, but also

• 20:07Speaker 01

  always, it is, one should think carefully about when to expose an idea to criticism. If one does it too early, it may cut off lines of, lines of thought, which although false, would lead to something true if one pursued them seriously.

• 20:29Chris Williamson?

  That is so cool. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with Element in it. Element is an electrolyte drink mixed with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue, supports brain function and helps to regulate your appetite throughout the day. I genuinely notice the difference when I take it versus when I don't, which is why I don't shut up about it. And also why it's used by everyone, from Dr. Andrew Huberman to Olympic athletes and FBI sniper teams. The good sniper teams, not the bad ones. Also, there are no questions asked refund policy. So if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just

• 21:12Chris Williamson?

  give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. So you're saying that if you have this nascent

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  early-stage idea and you put that out, somebody comes in with a certainty in criticism, which cuts off at the knees the progress of this particular idea of yours, you rob yourself from the opportunity of being wrong in a new way or wrong in multiple new ways, which would give you the idea. That is so fun. Also, I've got to call you out for this. The fact that you have been able to deal try and play gracefully with ideas with regards to the Fermi problem by constructing an entire new fictional universe in an attempt to get yourself a few million light years of distance away from potential criticism is kind of hilarious.

• 22:18Chris Williamson?

  What did you, what have you come to believe about the, it's also cool that you call it the Fermi problem, not the paradox, I suppose. What have you come, what have you come to believe about the Fermi problem?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  We don't know the answer. It's, you could also call it the Fermi mystery or, but, but you know, it's not so unusual. We, we don't know most things. So we don't know whether, whether we are alone in the universe. We might be or we might not be. The point I wanted to make is that, that

• 22:52Speaker 01

  it's easy to come up with explanations for why, why the, why the aliens or their, their robots are not here yet. It's, so this is, this is not of the form, like I said, of the form of problems I like, namely, it looks as though it must be so and so, and yet it looks, also looks as though it can't be so and so. So that, that, that's the kind of thing that I enjoy thinking about because there are two things which appear to be in collision and like quantum gravity. And, and no matter how you think about it, no matter how, whatever angle you look at it, it's still,

• 23:37Speaker 01

  it still seems like a collision. So that's, but, but the Fermi problem is not really, it's really a collision between one fantasy and another fantasy. It's, it's, we just don't know. Get over it.

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Getting back down to terra firma, is it fair to say that you hold optimism as a philosophical stance?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Although by optimism, I don't mean having a cheerful outlook on life or thinking that everything is going to be all right as a matter of principle. I mean that whenever something goes, it's more of an explanation for failure than a prophecy of success. It's, it's like whenever something goes wrong, it's because we had not yet

• 24:27Speaker 01

  created the knowledge to make it go right. It's always a matter of knowledge. So what you asked earlier about when, when you fail to persuade someone of something or when you fail to teach someone something, it's because you haven't yet thought of the way of meeting their problem. And of whether you really should be meeting that problem or maybe you should both go and do something better. So, you know, why, why, why does, is it really necessary for this other person to agree with you on this thing?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  So, so that's a uniform application of optimism. And pessimism is the opposite. It's where you regard failure as a barrier, as a barrier to ever getting out of the situation or solving the problem or going from bad to good. Going from bad to good is only, is always possible. And when we fail, it is always because we don't yet have the knowledge to succeed.

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  Should this broader worldview around optimism, should that extend to how we feel about our own lives individually? Because I have to assume that if you see failure as a way marker on route towards success, that's quite agentic. It's sort of personal determination. I have some sovereignty here. I imagine it must be difficult because you mentioned it's not just having a sort of cheerful, rosy outlook on life, but I imagine in some ways it must be quite difficult to maintain a non-rosy, non-cheerful outlook on life if you have a worldview that is predicated on this kind of optimism. Because you're going to see your own personal struggles through the lens of, well, I just need some more

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  knowledge and I'm sure that I can overcome this thing or I can make the decision that I don't need to overcome this thing. I'm interested in how this sort of relates to the individual and how they do deal with adversity and challenges in their own life.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  So optimism is no guarantee that you will solve the problem. You, you know, you might have a terminal illness and, and the doctor says to you, you've got X time to live. And you might think, well, you might think correctly, that's because we don't yet have the medical knowledge. Okay, that, that doesn't mean that there exists a way of you to quickly bone up on, on all the relevant medical knowledge, solve that problem, cure that disease and then survive. Although that has happened remarkably often.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  Somebody who's been diagnosed with something that's supposedly terminal has just speed run the, the solution for it and fixed themselves.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it has happened. So it's not impossible.

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  That's like those, those wartime medics where they were the only medic available in the tent and somehow they'd got shot. And you see these guys without anesthetic with a scalpel out, operating on himself. It feels a little bit like that.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And, and the, the lack of knowledge there might extend further than just the knowledge of how to perform an operation on yourself. I mean, you know, there's a war going on. That in itself should not have happened. With better knowledge, it would not have happened. But again, that, that's not a formula for correcting it yourself in the tent.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  So on the other hand, you can't say what, what you will solve. You, you, you might, you might, you might solve it. But the, in regard to what you do, you do not think this is insoluble. You do not think this is how far reason can reach and from now on, reason doesn't have any access. That's always false.

• 28:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder, why do you think it is that pessimism so often masquerades as sophistication?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Ah, I thought you were going to ask a different question. Yeah, why, why it masquerades as sophistication? Because it so.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Say you're writing a story about some characters who you're making the reader like the characters and suddenly one of the characters is going to get killed. And you know, and you're thinking, can they be saved? Can they be saved? And in the last chapter, they're not saved. Now, that is easy to write because knowledge in fiction is very hard to create, just as in real life. If to make a realistic story about how this situation, which you've set up to look as though that favored character is going to die.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  How that can end up with them being saved is is is hard. It's similarly hard to solving it in real life. So some authors just pull the the solution out of a hat. There's a deus ex machina, as the ancient Greeks presumably didn't say. So if you do that, the audience will be disappointed. They'll say, oh, you know, we've been had. I've just I've just spent, you know, two hours watching this movie or several days reading this long novel. And and the

• 30:27Speaker 01

  author has led me along. And then he's tricked me at the end.

• 30:32Chris Williamson?

  It was all a dream.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  For example, yeah, that's another. That's another way of doing it. So it's all a dream. So but similarly, what is not really realized is that the opposite tactic of saying, not only does he die, but everybody dies, like in Hamlet. That is equally a cop out. Anyone can write that ending. Just like anyone can write the deus ex machina ending. What you need to do is to solve the problem so that you will have told the reader some knowledge. Some, and you know, if it's a good novel, it's it's it should be knowledge about life in general,

• 31:17Speaker 01

  which they can use to understand the world and their own life and their friends and so on. It should enrich a person. But having it having it end unhappily is always a cheat. And that's that's that's true, whether it's a happier or sad ending pulled out of a hat.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  What's a current problem that you think people are most unnecessarily pessimistic about right now?

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Um, well, I guess it's the AI doom scenario. It might be the it might be the climate catastrophe scenario. I'm not sure exactly whether it's the same people who who are worried about both or different.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  I think the Venn diagram has probably got a good bit of crossover, yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. They are both examples of of looking at a problem and thinking of it as a barrier. So you have you say so and so could happen. We could all die. You're not taking into account that that is true. That is always true. That has always been true. Every day that the human species has existed. It's always been true that we could be hit by a comet and all die. In fact, just recently, the probability of that has gone down drastically because we have finally turned our attention as a species to the problem of diverting comets and asteroids.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  But if they're big enough, we still can't do it. But but still, the probability of it has has gone down. People used to worry about things like the oxygen will run out of the air because we're consuming oxygen and you know, where's it going to come from? And and and people have worried about things that aren't even a rational fear like like the apocalypse. Or, you know, the world is going to end on such and such a day and we'll all be judged wanting and so on. So, yeah, at the moment, I think it's the AI thing and and the

• 33:39Speaker 01

  climate catastrophe thing. It's not that those fears couldn't come true. It's that when you see them in perspective, you see it's an arbitrary choice to pick those things. In in a slightly different universe, we're we're still worrying about something else. Or we're worrying about whatever the next thing is, which we can't predict yet.

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  You hold, I would imagine, a rather unpopular opinion in the modern world, which is that AGIs aren't going to pose much greater risk than than humans already are. What's your what's your perspective at the moment on this AGI thing? I mentioned to you earlier on, this Jacob Coxon guy who was at OpenAI, I think for about three years, and he was at Anthropic recently. And he tweeted yesterday, I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. Some other safety researcher from Anthropic said there's a more than 10% chance that advanced AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  Models potentially like have a low risk at the moment, but future systems could become more capable, et cetera, et cetera. What, how do you come to, given your background, quantum computing, et cetera? How do you come to think about this conversation?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  So I think it's it's it's not a justified fear, as I just said, for reasons I've just said. But, you know, I'm old and I remember when people were saying this about nuclear reactors. And they said it so loudly and so often that people stopped making nuclear reactors, thereby causing the present climate problem. So they they didn't know. They picked, from my point of view, they picked at random one of the many bad things that could happen, but we don't know whether they will or won't. But there's no particular reason to think that they will, even though they could.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  And they picked that one at random and they alarmed everybody. And people took drastic action to avoid that alarm with catastrophic results. The worst effect on the environment that the that our species has ever had was the the turn away from nuclear power. So if we turn away from artificial intelligence because of a similar fiction, will it be? No, I was I was going to say it might well be a bigger catastrophe. I think I was a bit tempted to say something dramatic. No, I think it would be a big catastrophe, but not as big.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

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• 37:12Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. I don't know, I spent a good bit of time over the last few months in in SF and talking to people on every side of the fence, including sort of with the fence up inside of them as well, straddling both sides. Certainly, at least relatively uncontroversial opinion seems to be LLMs are not the architecture that can get us to something that is very scary, that that is going to be able to take over the world.

• 37:57Chris Williamson?

  Is that something that you would agree with?

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that follows directly from Popper's epistemology. Because the LLMs do not have a module in them capable of creativity. So they they they are.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  I mean, they they can do remarkable things. And a few years ago, I wouldn't have guessed that this kind of functionality is on the horizon for another fifty years. And yet it came all at once and everything worked one after the other. And the people who did it think that AGI is going to work as well for the same reason. But the the present the present L L M based AIs. Not only have they not shown any sign of AGI, but we know how they work, or at least some people know how they work. I don't, but but but we do know that that the people who designed them did not say,

• 39:05Speaker 01

  now we know what creativity really is. Now we can program it and all we need is some supercomputers. And we will, they they didn't say that. They they said, now, now we can build a language model, which will be able to speak English properly. And I would be like, good luck with that. And and they did. But it's one thing to achieve functionality that makes sense epistemologically and to achieve it much faster than was thought. And it's another to achieve a functionality that violates our best theory of what knowledge is. And that's another thing.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  People who think that L L Ms are going to deliver AGI, don't say, for example, well, Popper had only an approximation to the to the true theory of knowledge. He he didn't realize that that there's there's there's a gap in his theory. And this gap we have filled. We know how to fill that gap. And so if you just use his old theory, you'll say that AGI is impossible this way. But if you if you know what we know, then then you'll see why it's possible. They're not claiming that. They're saying it will just happen. If they have more compute, if they have more computer power available.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  But it's it's a previous kind of slight blip of the same type was when chess engines first started defeating grandmasters, the best grandmasters at chess. So a lot of people were saying, well, some people were saying, no, they'll never do it because humans have got some special thing in their brains and whatever. And and other people were saying, no, it's just a matter of doing it more computer power. But that's different because they had a theory of why it just requires more computer power. And when they achieved it, this is the thing that's hardly ever hardly ever mentioned.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  When a when a chess engine beats a grandmaster, they're doing it in a different way. The computation that is going on in the chess engine is a radically different kind of computation from the computation that's going on in the grandmaster. The grandmaster is is doing only like one millionth of the amount of computing power of computation than the than the chess engine does. And yet can reach a very high level, not quite as high as the as the machine, as the program. But still, they are doing a completely different thing.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And although we know how to write the program of a chess engine, we do not know how to write the program of a grandmaster. And this is this is why grandmasters can write a book, you know, my greatest games and how I won them, or, you know, something like that. And a chess engine can't. If you ask a chess engine how it won, it will say, well, if you do this move, then that will happen. And if that happens, this will happen. If that happens, this will have down to, you know, however many steps it can do nowadays. And a grandmaster will not say that.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  A grandmaster can't follow it down to anywhere near as many steps as a as a as a chess engine can. But a grandmaster will say something like, well, I thought that if I give up this pawn, it's going to create a weakness on the G file. And by weakness, he doesn't mean that he's followed down all the all the possible continuations. Whereas something that has can follow down all the continu- and by the way, some of those continuations may not lead to victory. He he might say, I thought this might work,

• 43:26Speaker 01

  but then five moves later, the bastard found a way out of it. And that that that can also happen. That also can't happen to a chess engine. So there are different types of program. We do not know how to write the grandmaster type of chess program, let alone an AGI. You know, when the grandmaster gets up, he then starts performing computations of orders of magnitude greater complexity than playing chess. It's it's just that that he he he's not engaging competitively in in something that requires insight.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  What is creativity, in your opinion? How how do you think about explaining that simply?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  The way I use the term is perhaps different from the way philosophers and others use it. Creativity, I I think, is not a not that impressive a thing, just creativity by itself. I I use that word to mean the ability to create new knowledge. So evolution is creative, is a creative process in that sense, in that it it starts off with an animal that that can't fly. And then then a few million years later, it's it has created an animal that can fly. And it it can fly because its genes encode knowledge of how to fly,

• 44:56Speaker 01

  including implicitly knowledge of aerodynamics and all sorts of things that we don't even have a handle on yet. But so it has created knowledge. The thing that humans have and that no existing other species has, although there were species in the past that had this, is explanatory creativity. Where we can, like like with the chess master, we not only we can say, I prefer this move to that move. You can say why. So I I I want to pick up this burning branch from the from the wildfire,

• 45:39Speaker 01

  like the, say, the first person who invented a a a campfire. I was just writing about this in my in my forthcoming book, actually. I I I I I want to pick this up because I want to carry it with me. And if I carry it with me, maybe the predators who might otherwise attack me, and I'm carrying food from the latest kill, will run away from me instead of me running away from them. Now, that idea, that's not that's not induction, that that's not any of the pre-Popper ways of thinking of the growth of knowledge.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  He he's not doing something he's seen before. He's he's he's imagining something that he's never seen before, that no one has ever seen before, namely carrying a branch in for protection against against the predators. And then, as as as he walks home with it, then he's saying, he he'll say, oh, well, it's getting dark, but I can still see. Maybe if I get this all the way home, we'll we'll all be able to be protected from the from the wild animals. And so on, that that's the kind of thinking that is not

• 47:00Speaker 01

  It cannot be characterized as optimizing for a given outcome like checkmate or like proving a mathematical theorem. It's more like discovering a new mathematical object which is interesting. But you can't, you can't give a computer a criterion of interesting. So you, you, humans can change the axioms to better axioms. And that's, that, humans are not just meeting a fixed criterion. And also, humans can change their mind.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  And he might decide, well, um, uh, we might, we might scare off the, the predators this way. But, um, we're getting burnt by the flames and it's not going to last us all the way home. So we better throw it away now and run home. That, that, that, that's the sort of thing you can think. If you have a genuine problem situation in mind rather than a criterion to meet.

• 48:04Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What do you make, given the importance of understanding education, uh, modesty? Or sort of nobility, humility, when it comes to learning? What do you make of the current education system?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Um, so I think that our society's present attitude to education, both for children and for in universities and, and, and for everybody in their own life, is, is based on a wrong theory. It's, it's, uh, what Popper calls the bucket theory of the mind, of the mind, which, which is that knowledge is a kind of fluid, which some people have and some people don't have of a particular kind. And the task is for the person who has it to pour it into the bucket. That is, the, the recipient is a kind of bucket for knowledge, which is initially empty. And you pour the knowledge in.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  So that is, um, very bad in a number of ways. In, in fact, edu- education is, is the last holdout of pre-enlightenment theories of knowledge. Everywhere else, we at least give lip service to enlightenment theories. Like you, you don't give someone authority to override the wishes of someone else. Uh, you, you, you don't necessarily respect the opinion of someone else just because of their status. And, and so on. This is, we may not enact this perfectly, as we were saying earlier in this conversation. But, but it's, it's, it's largely agreed that this is what we should be doing.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  In education, it's the other way around. We, we judge education by how well and how accurately you fill the bucket. And so one of the things that's wrong with that is that when something goes wrong, which it nearly always does, then you will immediately jump for the, to the conclusion. So what has gone wrong? Well, the bucket, it's either leaky or it, it didn't want to receive the fluid. But there can't be anything wrong with the fluid because the fluid is knowledge. That is by definition what we want to transfer. By definition, transferring it is success. So we measure success according to, say, exam results or something.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  And then because of the natural, uh, the, the natural arms race or, uh, the self, self-sustaining, um, uh, situation that, that happens in many human situations that aren't rational. Um, the incentive is to spend more and more time on meeting a criterion and less and less time on things that can't be measured, which are the important things. So, uh, at least with chess, you can measure how good a grandmaster is.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Although you cannot easily measure how good a grandmaster is at explaining or at teaching or at giving a running commentary on, on chess games. There is no criterion for that. There's no mechanical way. You can say, well, I, I've got 93% on the explaining my, um, uh, explaining my moves test, so I must be good at explaining my moves. There is no such thing. And everything that is important in education is of that type and not of the testable type. Uh, I, I omit, uh, things where, where

• 51:50Speaker 01

  being able to execute, just execute the criterion perfectly is the task. Like being an airline pilot. But even an airline pilot, you know, an airline pilot who doesn't know the, what the different controls do is not going to be a good airline pilot. But even with an airline pilot, understanding is extremely important. It may not be as important as being able to operate the controls, but it is extremely important.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Uh, but, uh, things that we learn in school and in most university courses are, are not like that. The, the course and the exam are designed as proxies for the thing that you actually want. And they are very poor proxies. The only reason they are proxies at all is that people who really want to do the thing are willing to waste their time learning to pass the criterion.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

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• 53:30Chris Williamson?

  Niobia, terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. What is a better approach then for somebody who wants to learn a lot from people who know a lot? Should people exit formal education as quickly as possible? Uh, we presumably can't upend the entire system right now immediately. What's your advice?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  I, uh, I, I, upending is outside my wheelhouse. Like, you know, I, I don't, I don't know how to formulate good political policies that will gain wide acceptance. But, uh, technically, we can, we, we do now with the internet. Uh, we do have the means of completely upending the system and not having any compulsory education, certainly for children. But, uh, I, I think, uh, there are more and more ways of, um, adapting university education to, to technologies like, um, the internet

• 54:31Speaker 01

  and also, um, uh, collaborative technologies where, where you, where you have, for example, access to somebody, access to somebody is, can be very valuable. Where, um, compulsory subordination to that very same person would, would be very bad for you.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  So you, uh, today, you know, you, you can write an email, anyone can write an email to any famous person and have a reasonable chance of getting an answer, even if it's only, read my book, you dolt.

• 55:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  But, but, but even that, even that is, is, is a lot better than, than what things used to be like, say, even 30 years ago. But even 30 years ago, it would have been better, in my opinion, not to have compulsory subjects and not to have compulsory education of any kind.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about discipline and forcing yourself to do things? I've seen that you appear to be very anti this, despite it being kind of the, uh, one of the most popular worldviews at the moment to put your feelings to one side and push through and, and sort of ignore how you feel. What's your perspective on discipline and?

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Like, like many things in, in epistemology and in psychology, the same words, the same terms can be used to describe absolutely opposite things. So for example, take a mountaineer who enjoys climbing Mount Everest or, or difficult mountains, who, who looks, looks for difficult climb, where other people have failed, perhaps other people have been killed. And he goes on the climb and on the climb, he undergoes severe privation. And what would be suffering to almost anyone else. But, but to him, it's just privation. It's, you know, it's, it's getting cold.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Uh, every fiber of his being wants to go back down and, and go, get back in the warm. But he wants to get to the top. And all the pain and suffering and discomfort is just, it's, it's not just, it's not that he overrides it, though in a sense he does. But what's really happening is that that's what he's there for. That's why he chose this climb. If it were easy, he wouldn't have chosen it. Uh, now, so what is, um, for one person, the very, you know, this is the reason he's alive. This is the reason he gets up in the morning.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  It is, it is in anticipation of doing this thing. For, for almost anyone else, it would be torture. What's more, almost anyone else couldn't do it well enough. They, they, they would eventually fall off. It's only because he loves it that he has put in the, the amount of practice and work and thinking and, and analysis and so on, that allows him to reach the top of this difficult climb. This is.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  In the case of mountaineering, we're talking about actual pain and so on. But most things don't have actual pain, physical pain, but they do have psychological pain, boredom, despair, fear, and all that kind of thing. And so in that sense, I think the mountaineer is a good analogy to all learning. All learning should be like that. It should be something that you would

• 58:28Speaker 01

  you would pay the price to have it, just like the mountaineer does. Or like I was talking the other day to a Formula One driver. And I was saying, God, you know, in Formula One racing, you have to have reactions that are approximately one-half the length of a human reaction time. So that means that you must start doing the thing before you have the information in front of you. Because you have understood the course and the vehicle and so on well enough. And you must do that again and again and again during the race. And every so often, you will spin off and you will risk your life and so on.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  And so most people, again, would hate to do that. You know, most people would pay a lot to not have to do that. But also, if they were forced to do it, they wouldn't do it well because they do not love it. So I think having discipline and forcing yourself could be a form of words that describes this mountaineer. And in that case, it is wonderful. It is, in a sense, the best thing in the world. Whereas somebody forcing themselves to

• 59:58Speaker 01

  get the GCSE maths thing and spending the whole summer preparing for the GCSE maths and just scraping through and then starting the very next day, forgetting everything they knew, that is the epitome of something bad. That's something that shouldn't happen. It's in a rational society, that would never happen. That would be, if that happened even once, it would be headline in the newspaper and heads would roll.

• 1:00:31Chris Williamson?

  So from an individual's perspective, obviously, we are still contending with and navigating the world. And it is, in some ways, scarce or misaligned to what it is that we want to do. So sometimes you have to do that. You have to use your "I will get it done" muscle. You don't want to take the trash out. The trash sucks and it smells and you don't want to do it. But you have to do it, so you're gonna do it. Your perspective here is that if we were to construct a rational society, it would be people doing things that are in alignment with what they want to do. And in the interim, between where we are now and hopefully a future world where that's the case, you're gonna have to apply some of this. But the goal is to use less and less of it over time?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  Less and less. Less and less over time, but also less and less in your life. So first of all, the answer is to get it over with. So you should be leading your good life, not being overwhelmed by the bad things. And then, once you've, once you're getting it over with, you can improve the situation. There are no situations, or almost no situations in everyday life, that cannot be improved a little. So you can apply knowledge to getting it over with a little, you know.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  I don't know, buy a better rubbish bin, which is not so disgusting to empty. Or live in a place where the rubbish bin emptying is easier or is a shorter way.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Buy a different type of bags that you enjoy seeing briefly as you take it toward the...

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So and then there's also the opportunity to just learn to enjoy it. So even taking the rubbish out has aspects that one can enjoy. For example, if one has been working on the computer all day and one's limbs have forgotten how to move, then at least going out with the rubbish takes you into the fresh air. And you can see the neighborhood and you can say hello to the person across the road

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  who is also taking out their rubbish and so on. So there's nothing that can't be improved at least a bit. And it's bad to be in the state of mind that I should have discipline and therefore reducing it is reducing the good thing. It's not. Reducing the thing you don't like is always good.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You mentioned the good life. What have you come to believe about how people should prioritize their focus in order to achieve something that resembles a good life?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Like with many things, diversity is the key. So I don't think there's a formula which applies to everybody. In fact, I don't think there's a formula that applies to any two people. Any two people are very different. In fact, more different than we are really capable of understanding. Humans are, individual humans are as different from each other as humans in general are from other species. A person is like a different species. So what, some people like to live a life of

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  intellectual problem solving. There is a wonderful passage in Popper's autobiography where he says that the thing to do in life is to find a problem, fall in love with it, live with it for the rest of your life, get married to it, live with it for the rest of your life until death do you part. And if you happen to solve it, the tone in which he says that is, if you're unlucky enough to happen to solve it, then there will be delightful problem children. So and it's quite interesting that he uses the phrase "problem children"

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  deliberately to highlight the fact that problem in his philosophy has these two opposite meanings. So we can say, you know, problem children is a term, a sort of euphemism that was invented for children that you would not want to live with. Whereas he is using it for something that you really ought to live with. And a lot of people who are the survivors of doing unusual things and then advocate that people should do these unusual things, they often gloss over the difference

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  between good discipline and bad discipline, good problem and bad problem. And they will say things that are exactly right for them because they were following the good path, if I can put it that way. But it's often taken to mean that you have to knuckle down and do your chores and then your homework and then go to bed. And that's, which is the opposite of what you should be doing, even though it can be described in the same words.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yeah. There's this line from John Steinbeck, which is pretty fun. He says, "I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction." And when doing a little bit of thinking about my Golden Retriever translation of your worldview on mass, civilisationally, across time, individually, you know, existentially, it kind of, I think that's probably, that's not a bad summation. "I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction." Or you could say "feels so much like destruction" or is accused of being so much of destruction.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yes, the last one is perhaps the best because what it feels, it could feel either way, that's the trouble. You can't really tell from the outside necessarily because people can force themselves as well as being forced by other people. And they can be pursuing a very hard path, which they want to pursue, which is joyful to them, without that being noticeable either. The only time that that's noticeable, the only times that that's noticeable is when the thing they're pursuing happens to have a good reputation. Like, like if somebody spends 10 hours a day practicing chess, or,

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  or practicing some martial art, or whatever it is, people will see what they're doing, that they, they are, they are adopting the discipline and making themselves power through to, to being good at this thing, which, which society thinks is a good thing. But a very similar thing, like a video game, which is almost the same thing psychologically, but which is socially frowned on, people will say, that's not a good thing to be devoting yourself to. They will be blind to the effort and creativity that's going into it, and they will instead try to apply a discipline in the opposite direction.

• 1:08:22Chris Williamson?

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  money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. You mentioned that you were working on a book. That's a fiction book. Have you got anything else that's in the pipeline as well, or is that it?

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yes, at least two other books. One is a textbook on quantum mechanics, quantum theory, rather, which I'm writing with Sam Kuyper and Chiara Miletto, my colleagues. And because we, we think that existing textbooks and existing ways of teaching quantum, quantum theory are just misconceived in many ways, and we, we want to get it right. So that's one thing. Another thing is I'm, I'm writing the third book in my sort of sequel to my first two books, Fabric of Reality and Beginning of Infinity. I'm writing another one, very

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  difficult. It's, I, I, I, I think, I think it's an example of mountaineering rather than

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  being forced.

• 1:10:15Chris Williamson?

  Taking the brush out.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's tentatively called Irrationality, though I don't quite like the title because it gives the wrong impression, at least at first. The subtitle at the moment is how thinking works and what the obstacles to it are. So that's, I think, a better title, but it's a bit clunky.

• 1:10:46Chris Williamson?

  And whilst doing textbook plus difficult third album to previously quite complex initial two books, you also got the fiction book put together as well?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Yes, I've also, I've also got my day job. So apart from those three, yes.

• 1:11:05Chris Williamson?

  Oh, well, at least you're keeping yourself busy. David Deutsch, ladies and gentlemen. David, you're awesome. I appreciate you. It's very nice to hear a fellow accent as well. What should people be looking out for over the next couple of months? When, is there something going to drop before the end of the year? One of the books, one of the fiction book, do we know when that's going to come out?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  I think that's unlikely in the next couple of months, but in the next year, fingers crossed, yes, one of, one of them may drop.

• 1:11:29Chris Williamson?

  Beautiful. David, I appreciate you very much. Thank you for today.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. Very pleasant.

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