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Steven Pinker (Steven Pinker) returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But tylercowen wonders: can there be too much common...

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Conversations with Tyler

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22,273 次观看 • 10 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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On laughter generating common knowledge: "Laughter is--like eye contact, like direct speech--generates common knowledge. When you're laughing, you know it, because your breathing is interrupted. People around you know it, because they can hear the laughter. It interrupts your speech, and so people who are listening to you know that you're laughing, and you know that you're laughing. So it's generally common knowledge of something. What is that common knowledge? It's generally common knowledge of some infirmity, indignity, embarrassment, cause for humility. And the laughter makes that private knowledge of an infirmity common knowledge. There's something that we all knew compromised that person's dignity, stature. Now, we are all acknowledging it commonly, which means that that person's stature has gone down." Clip on laughter and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:
0:54

On laughter generating common knowledge: "Laughter is--like eye contact, like direct speech--generates common knowledge. When you're laughing, you know it, because your breathing is interrupted. People around you know it, because they can hear the laughter. It interrupts your speech, and so people who are listening to you know that you're laughing, and you know that you're laughing. So it's generally common knowledge of something. What is that common knowledge? It's generally common knowledge of some infirmity, indignity, embarrassment, cause for humility. And the laughter makes that private knowledge of an infirmity common knowledge. There's something that we all knew compromised that person's dignity, stature. Now, we are all acknowledging it commonly, which means that that person's stature has gone down." Clip on laughter and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

42,797 次观看 • 9 个月前

"Salience is the more common way that we entertain common knowledge, generated by certain common knowledge generators like direct speech, but also laughter, I argue, tears, blushing. We have nonverbal common knowledge generators and eye contact. With eye contact, you're looking at the part of the person that's looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of them, ad infinitum. Eye contact is a very powerful signal. Eye contact makes something that was private knowledge, common knowledge, which is why we and our primate ancestors are very sensitive to eye contact." Clip on common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:
0:40

"Salience is the more common way that we entertain common knowledge, generated by certain common knowledge generators like direct speech, but also laughter, I argue, tears, blushing. We have nonverbal common knowledge generators and eye contact. With eye contact, you're looking at the part of the person that's looking at the part of you that's looking at the part of them, ad infinitum. Eye contact is a very powerful signal. Eye contact makes something that was private knowledge, common knowledge, which is why we and our primate ancestors are very sensitive to eye contact." Clip on common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

47,007 次观看 • 9 个月前

Why don't we just cut the crap and say it? And the conclusion that I came to, this is an earlier book, The Stuff of Thought (subtitle is Language is a Window into Human Nature), is that direct speech generates common knowledge, and that common knowledge is the basis of our social relationships. Two people--if they're friends, if they're lovers, if they're transactional partners, if they're in a dominance hierarchy--all of those are equilibria in coordination games, and they're matters of common knowledge. In the case of friends, it's we're equal, we would do anything for each other, we're there for each other, and that's kind of the common knowledge that makes friends friends. Clip on direct speech and common knowledge from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- My new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life is available here:
0:48

Why don't we just cut the crap and say it? And the conclusion that I came to, this is an earlier book, The Stuff of Thought (subtitle is Language is a Window into Human Nature), is that direct speech generates common knowledge, and that common knowledge is the basis of our social relationships. Two people--if they're friends, if they're lovers, if they're transactional partners, if they're in a dominance hierarchy--all of those are equilibria in coordination games, and they're matters of common knowledge. In the case of friends, it's we're equal, we would do anything for each other, we're there for each other, and that's kind of the common knowledge that makes friends friends. Clip on direct speech and common knowledge from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- My new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life is available here:

Steven Pinker

56,084 次观看 • 9 个月前

Me: I discuss in the book—it refers to the state where I know something, you know something, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, and so on ad infinitum. So it differs a bit from the conventional usage, which just refers to something that everyone knows. Here, everyone has to know that everyone knows. Times Radio Interviewer (Daniel Finkelstein Daniel Finkelstein): Can I use this with reference to the interview that I did yesterday with my brother? My brother’s a professor at City University; he’s president of the university, and there’s a campaign at the moment going on against one of their professors who was in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1980s. We were having a discussion about how the university was standing up for the free speech of its staff, and I’d begun to wonder, as I went home reading your book on the tube, whether I’d made a big mistake—because the protest against this professor is really just a coordination exercise, isn’t it? And maybe I’d aided it by talking about it. Me: Oh yes—protests are coordination exercises. They’re designed to make private knowledge common knowledge. So, in a repressive regime, everyone may know that they despise the government, but because criticism of the government is punished, people might keep their opinions to themselves, with a result that they really don’t know what their fellow citizens think. Each one might think that they’re the only ones that are disgruntled, and so they can’t fear standing up to—they fear standing up to oppose the regime, because they can be picked off one at a time. If everyone were to protest at once, no government has the firepower to intimidate all its citizens at once. In a public protest, people can see other people there, and they know that the people there see other people there, and that can give them the strength and numbers to oppose the regime—sometimes by literally storming the palace, or sometimes just bringing the machinery of the state to a halt through work stoppages. But the crucial thing is that they are coordinated. They can only be coordinated if everyone knows that everyone knows that they hate the regime. Daniel Finkelstein: I suppose that social media is making people—is increasing the stock of common knowledge. We’re all much more aware of what other people like us, in particular like us, know, and we also know that other people know it, and so on, as you put it, and that makes people have more common knowledge. It’s not making us happier though; maybe we’d be better with less common knowledge? Me: Social media are making us more connected within certain circles—that is, those who are receiving the same texts and feeds that we are. It reduces the pool of, or shrinks the largest pool of common knowledge, namely the whole country, which may have been accessible in a day in which, say, in the United States there were three networks, or in Britain everyone was listening to the BBC. And yes, it probably doesn’t make us as happy, because when everything is public, it means that your reputation is on the line for anything you say or do. It means that since social media allow us to generate common knowledge, not just receive it like in the old days, it means that attacks on people’s reputation can be common knowledge, which means that it’s all the more painful for people on the receiving end of the attack. It may have something to do with the fact that in certain demographics—especially young people whose lives increasingly are online—that there’s that much more social competition, opportunities for gossip and ostracism and demeaning comments, and so on. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:
3:39

Me: I discuss in the book—it refers to the state where I know something, you know something, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, and so on ad infinitum. So it differs a bit from the conventional usage, which just refers to something that everyone knows. Here, everyone has to know that everyone knows. Times Radio Interviewer (Daniel Finkelstein Daniel Finkelstein): Can I use this with reference to the interview that I did yesterday with my brother? My brother’s a professor at City University; he’s president of the university, and there’s a campaign at the moment going on against one of their professors who was in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1980s. We were having a discussion about how the university was standing up for the free speech of its staff, and I’d begun to wonder, as I went home reading your book on the tube, whether I’d made a big mistake—because the protest against this professor is really just a coordination exercise, isn’t it? And maybe I’d aided it by talking about it. Me: Oh yes—protests are coordination exercises. They’re designed to make private knowledge common knowledge. So, in a repressive regime, everyone may know that they despise the government, but because criticism of the government is punished, people might keep their opinions to themselves, with a result that they really don’t know what their fellow citizens think. Each one might think that they’re the only ones that are disgruntled, and so they can’t fear standing up to—they fear standing up to oppose the regime, because they can be picked off one at a time. If everyone were to protest at once, no government has the firepower to intimidate all its citizens at once. In a public protest, people can see other people there, and they know that the people there see other people there, and that can give them the strength and numbers to oppose the regime—sometimes by literally storming the palace, or sometimes just bringing the machinery of the state to a halt through work stoppages. But the crucial thing is that they are coordinated. They can only be coordinated if everyone knows that everyone knows that they hate the regime. Daniel Finkelstein: I suppose that social media is making people—is increasing the stock of common knowledge. We’re all much more aware of what other people like us, in particular like us, know, and we also know that other people know it, and so on, as you put it, and that makes people have more common knowledge. It’s not making us happier though; maybe we’d be better with less common knowledge? Me: Social media are making us more connected within certain circles—that is, those who are receiving the same texts and feeds that we are. It reduces the pool of, or shrinks the largest pool of common knowledge, namely the whole country, which may have been accessible in a day in which, say, in the United States there were three networks, or in Britain everyone was listening to the BBC. And yes, it probably doesn’t make us as happy, because when everything is public, it means that your reputation is on the line for anything you say or do. It means that since social media allow us to generate common knowledge, not just receive it like in the old days, it means that attacks on people’s reputation can be common knowledge, which means that it’s all the more painful for people on the receiving end of the attack. It may have something to do with the fact that in certain demographics—especially young people whose lives increasingly are online—that there’s that much more social competition, opportunities for gossip and ostracism and demeaning comments, and so on. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

21,547 次观看 • 7 个月前

"Yes, it’s too soon to tell, but it is interesting that large language models, as opposed to social media, have tended to be much more aligned with what we would consider objective reality and truth. That is, I think it’s not so easy to get a large language model to endorse a ridiculous conspiracy theory, such as that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen or that COVID vaccines are actually microchips that Bill Gates is implanting to surveil us. All of those ideas are very easy to find on social media. And it may indeed be, as you say, that large language models tend to gravitate toward common priors—namely, all the knowledge that’s out there on the web. But, in particular, during pre-training and post-training—the fine-tuning process—they are engineered to be aligned with truth and reality. And that is because the AI companies have a different business model than the social media companies." From an episode of Scaling Theory with Thibault Schrepel: Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge, From Eye Contact to the Super Bowl
1:02

"Yes, it’s too soon to tell, but it is interesting that large language models, as opposed to social media, have tended to be much more aligned with what we would consider objective reality and truth. That is, I think it’s not so easy to get a large language model to endorse a ridiculous conspiracy theory, such as that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen or that COVID vaccines are actually microchips that Bill Gates is implanting to surveil us. All of those ideas are very easy to find on social media. And it may indeed be, as you say, that large language models tend to gravitate toward common priors—namely, all the knowledge that’s out there on the web. But, in particular, during pre-training and post-training—the fine-tuning process—they are engineered to be aligned with truth and reality. And that is because the AI companies have a different business model than the social media companies." From an episode of Scaling Theory with Thibault Schrepel: Steven Pinker on Common Knowledge, From Eye Contact to the Super Bowl

Steven Pinker

58,144 次观看 • 1 个月前

I'll be giving talks on common knowledge in Australia and New Zealand in February 2026. Tickets : "I begin the book with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes because it’s the quintessential illustration of common knowledge. When the boy said the Emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. They could see the Emperor was naked, but he changed the state of their knowledge nonetheless because, by blurting it out within earshot of everyone, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the Emperor was naked. So it shows, first of all, that even though the concept of common knowledge, as I defined it, seems impossible—your head starts to spin after, you know, one or two “I know that she knows,” let alone an infinite number. But what the story shows is that a conspicuous, public, self-evident event—something that you see while you see everyone else seeing it, or you hear when you know everyone else can hear it—can give you common knowledge at a stroke. And the other moral is that it changed the relationship of the people to the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And a major theme of the book is that common knowledge, even though it sounds like this abstruse, recondite academic concept, actually figures into everyday life, figures into our money, and figures into our politics, because it enables coordination and it changes social relationships." Thinkable -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
1:27

I'll be giving talks on common knowledge in Australia and New Zealand in February 2026. Tickets : "I begin the book with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes because it’s the quintessential illustration of common knowledge. When the boy said the Emperor was naked, he wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know. They could see the Emperor was naked, but he changed the state of their knowledge nonetheless because, by blurting it out within earshot of everyone, now everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that the Emperor was naked. So it shows, first of all, that even though the concept of common knowledge, as I defined it, seems impossible—your head starts to spin after, you know, one or two “I know that she knows,” let alone an infinite number. But what the story shows is that a conspicuous, public, self-evident event—something that you see while you see everyone else seeing it, or you hear when you know everyone else can hear it—can give you common knowledge at a stroke. And the other moral is that it changed the relationship of the people to the Emperor, from obsequious deference to ridicule and scorn. And a major theme of the book is that common knowledge, even though it sounds like this abstruse, recondite academic concept, actually figures into everyday life, figures into our money, and figures into our politics, because it enables coordination and it changes social relationships." Thinkable -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Steven Pinker

22,283 次观看 • 8 个月前

"So what innuendo, euphemism, and indirect speech acts do is prevent the proposition from becoming common knowledge. That is, let’s say he said, “Do you want to come up for Netflix and chill?” She says no. She’s a grown-up; she knows this was a sexual invitation. And he’s a grown-up; he knows it too. But does he know that she knows that he knows it? He can still think, “Well, maybe she thinks I’m dense. Maybe she thinks I don’t know that she knowingly turned down a sexual invitation.” And as far as she’s concerned, he might think she just didn’t want to stay out late. And she could think, “Well, maybe he thinks I’m naïve. Maybe he thinks I just didn’t want to be out late, and he might think I’m just turning down an invitation for Netflix.” Without the common knowledge—the “he knows that I know that he knows that I know”—they can maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship without sacrificing their claim to rationality and sanity. If it had been blurted out, “Hey, do you want to have sex?” and she were to say no, then they couldn’t maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship, or of colleagues at work, or, even more dangerously, a supervisor and supervisee. And so we use indirect speech, I argue, to keep things out of common knowledge—out of relationship-threatening common knowledge." Clip on innuendo and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:
1:40

"So what innuendo, euphemism, and indirect speech acts do is prevent the proposition from becoming common knowledge. That is, let’s say he said, “Do you want to come up for Netflix and chill?” She says no. She’s a grown-up; she knows this was a sexual invitation. And he’s a grown-up; he knows it too. But does he know that she knows that he knows it? He can still think, “Well, maybe she thinks I’m dense. Maybe she thinks I don’t know that she knowingly turned down a sexual invitation.” And as far as she’s concerned, he might think she just didn’t want to stay out late. And she could think, “Well, maybe he thinks I’m naïve. Maybe he thinks I just didn’t want to be out late, and he might think I’m just turning down an invitation for Netflix.” Without the common knowledge—the “he knows that I know that he knows that I know”—they can maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship without sacrificing their claim to rationality and sanity. If it had been blurted out, “Hey, do you want to have sex?” and she were to say no, then they couldn’t maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship, or of colleagues at work, or, even more dangerously, a supervisor and supervisee. And so we use indirect speech, I argue, to keep things out of common knowledge—out of relationship-threatening common knowledge." Clip on innuendo and common knowledge, the topic of my new book, from an interview with Robert Contofalsky (Robert Contofalsky) of R-Academy. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life:

Steven Pinker

65,013 次观看 • 9 个月前

With The Fifth Column 🖐 talking about common knowledge: “Common knowledge can be generated at a stroke when something is witnessed in a forum where you can witness other people witnessing it. So if something just happens in public and you can see everyone else seeing it, that gives you an instant intuition that there’s common knowledge. Humor, I suggest in one of the chapters, is a common-knowledge generator, usually of some infirmity or indignity or weakness in someone or something. And the laughter, which is conspicuous—you can hear it when someone is laughing; it interrupts their speech and breathing—at the moment of laughter, suddenly becomes common knowledge. Everyone who gets the joke suddenly realizes that someone has been taken down, and they realize that everyone else realizes it. And that’s why freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are suppressed in autocracies. The joke from the Soviet era is about the man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrest him, take him down to headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They say, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And he says, ‘What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.’ And the reason that it was subversive is that he was generating common knowledge. Just the mere fact of trying to make something public, even if you don’t have to stipulate what it is, can generate the coordination—everyone acting together to bring down a regime.”
1:18

With The Fifth Column 🖐 talking about common knowledge: “Common knowledge can be generated at a stroke when something is witnessed in a forum where you can witness other people witnessing it. So if something just happens in public and you can see everyone else seeing it, that gives you an instant intuition that there’s common knowledge. Humor, I suggest in one of the chapters, is a common-knowledge generator, usually of some infirmity or indignity or weakness in someone or something. And the laughter, which is conspicuous—you can hear it when someone is laughing; it interrupts their speech and breathing—at the moment of laughter, suddenly becomes common knowledge. Everyone who gets the joke suddenly realizes that someone has been taken down, and they realize that everyone else realizes it. And that’s why freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are suppressed in autocracies. The joke from the Soviet era is about the man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrest him, take him down to headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They say, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And he says, ‘What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.’ And the reason that it was subversive is that he was generating common knowledge. Just the mere fact of trying to make something public, even if you don’t have to stipulate what it is, can generate the coordination—everyone acting together to bring down a regime.”

Steven Pinker

44,931 次观看 • 2 个月前

Yes, what's happening in the Monty Hall problem is not common knowledge, but it is knowledge about knowledge. To use a fancy term, recursive mentalizing, where mentalizing means getting into someone else's head, trying to figure out what they know. Recursive mentalizing is trying to get inside their head, and when they're trying to get inside your head, as you're trying to get inside their head at an item. So that's common knowledge. In the case of the Monty Hall problem, it's private knowledge, namely, Monty Hall knows You know that he knows, you don't know what he knows. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
0:28

Yes, what's happening in the Monty Hall problem is not common knowledge, but it is knowledge about knowledge. To use a fancy term, recursive mentalizing, where mentalizing means getting into someone else's head, trying to figure out what they know. Recursive mentalizing is trying to get inside their head, and when they're trying to get inside your head, as you're trying to get inside their head at an item. So that's common knowledge. In the case of the Monty Hall problem, it's private knowledge, namely, Monty Hall knows You know that he knows, you don't know what he knows. -- When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

Steven Pinker

26,462 次观看 • 8 个月前

The data behind the “common knowledge” that "settler violence" is a huge and growing problem is provided by the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). But what do they consider violence? Turns out, too much Watch Natasha Hausdorff make sense of nonsense.
0:39

The data behind the “common knowledge” that "settler violence" is a huge and growing problem is provided by the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). But what do they consider violence? Turns out, too much Watch Natasha Hausdorff make sense of nonsense.

Regavim

11,567 次观看 • 4 个月前

.Naval: You define wealth in a beautiful way. You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect. So as a society it becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody. A given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them—but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them. Knowledge is a huge force multiplier. You then define resources as the thing that you combine with knowledge to create wealth. New knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we’re running out of. There are lots of examples of how we’ve done that in the past. For example, in energy we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. But then people say, “Now we’re out of ideas. Now we’re caught up. Now we’re done. There aren’t going to be new ideas, and now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.” The counter to that is, “No, we’ll create new knowledge and have new resources. Don’t worry about the old ones.” Well they say, “If you’re going to have new resources, if you can’t think of them now, it’s not real.” This now gets into the realm of people demanding that if you’re going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now. Otherwise it’s not real. But that seems like a Catch-22. David Deutsch: It does, and it’s a bad argument. I don’t want to claim that the knowledge will be created. We’re fallible; we may not create it. We may destroy ourselves. We may miss the solution that’s right under our nose, so that when the snailiens come from another galaxy and look at us, they’ll say, “How can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?” That could happen. I can’t prove or argue that it won’t happen. What I always argue, though, is that we have what it takes. We have everything that it takes to achieve that. If we don’t, it’ll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system. Naval: It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge. David Deutsch: Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors. Again, it doesn’t take malevolence to make mistakes. Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later one of those will get us. Naval: Don’t destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality. I love that. I think about places like North Korea where you can’t have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they’ve destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time. That is a case where humanity is trapped in a local minimum, and it’s very hard to climb out of that hole. If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we’ve lost our biggest advantage. We’ve lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.
3:08

.Naval: You define wealth in a beautiful way. You talk about wealth as a set of physical transformations that we can affect. So as a society it becomes very clear that knowledge leads directly to wealth creation for everybody. A given individual can obviously affect physical transformations proportional to the resources available to them—but much more proportional to the knowledge available to them. Knowledge is a huge force multiplier. You then define resources as the thing that you combine with knowledge to create wealth. New knowledge allows you to use new things as resources and discard old things that maybe we’re running out of. There are lots of examples of how we’ve done that in the past. For example, in energy we’ve gone from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. But then people say, “Now we’re out of ideas. Now we’re caught up. Now we’re done. There aren’t going to be new ideas, and now we have to freeze the frame and conserve what we have.” The counter to that is, “No, we’ll create new knowledge and have new resources. Don’t worry about the old ones.” Well they say, “If you’re going to have new resources, if you can’t think of them now, it’s not real.” This now gets into the realm of people demanding that if you’re going to claim that new knowledge will be created, you have to name that knowledge now. Otherwise it’s not real. But that seems like a Catch-22. David Deutsch: It does, and it’s a bad argument. I don’t want to claim that the knowledge will be created. We’re fallible; we may not create it. We may destroy ourselves. We may miss the solution that’s right under our nose, so that when the snailiens come from another galaxy and look at us, they’ll say, “How can it possibly be that they failed to do so-and-so when it was right in front of them?” That could happen. I can’t prove or argue that it won’t happen. What I always argue, though, is that we have what it takes. We have everything that it takes to achieve that. If we don’t, it’ll be because of bad choices we have made, not because of constraints imposed on us by the planet or the solar system. Naval: It will be by anti-rational memes that restrict the creation of knowledge and the growth of knowledge. David Deutsch: Maybe. Or maybe it’ll be by well-intentioned errors, which nobody could see why they were errors. Again, it doesn’t take malevolence to make mistakes. Mistakes are the normal condition of humans. All we can do is try to find them. Maybe not destroying the means of correcting errors is the heart of morality; because if there is no way of correcting errors, then sooner or later one of those will get us. Naval: Don’t destroy the means of error correction is the base of morality. I love that. I think about places like North Korea where you can’t have elections and a revolution is very difficult because the gang in charge is armed to the teeth and they’ve destroyed the means of political error correction for a long time. That is a case where humanity is trapped in a local minimum, and it’s very hard to climb out of that hole. If too much of the world falls into that mindset, then we as a species may just stagnate because we’ve lost our biggest advantage. We’ve lost our biggest discovery, which was the ability to make new discoveries.

Deutsch Explains

143,949 次观看 • 2 年前

Galen Druke (Galen Druke) interviewed me about common knowledge, the topic of my new book (link in thread): Me: What common knowledge does in informal interactions is it ratifies social relationships. So if two people are friends, if they’re lovers, if one of them is dominant and the other is subordinate—that is, one always gets it this way—these exist because each party knows the other one knows they exist. And they survive by being common knowledge. Sometimes we don’t want to destroy a relationship, and so we keep things out of common knowledge by using euphemism or innuendo or genteel hypocrisy. Druke: What’s an example of this? Me: At the end of a date, you’ve got a couple of friends and one says, “Hey, do you want to kind of come up for coffee—or Netflix and chill?” That’s very different from, “Do you want to have sex?” even though if they’re both grownups, they both know that it’s having sex. So there’s a denial of common knowledge, which would allow them—if the overture is not reciprocated—to go back to being platonic friends or workplace colleagues.
1:03

Galen Druke (Galen Druke) interviewed me about common knowledge, the topic of my new book (link in thread): Me: What common knowledge does in informal interactions is it ratifies social relationships. So if two people are friends, if they’re lovers, if one of them is dominant and the other is subordinate—that is, one always gets it this way—these exist because each party knows the other one knows they exist. And they survive by being common knowledge. Sometimes we don’t want to destroy a relationship, and so we keep things out of common knowledge by using euphemism or innuendo or genteel hypocrisy. Druke: What’s an example of this? Me: At the end of a date, you’ve got a couple of friends and one says, “Hey, do you want to kind of come up for coffee—or Netflix and chill?” That’s very different from, “Do you want to have sex?” even though if they’re both grownups, they both know that it’s having sex. So there’s a denial of common knowledge, which would allow them—if the overture is not reciprocated—to go back to being platonic friends or workplace colleagues.

Steven Pinker

22,350 次观看 • 10 个月前

Why do dictatorships look permanent right up to the night they fall? Because a regime can survive a million private grievances. What it can't survive is everyone finding out that everyone agrees. Money, laws, revolutions — all run on common knowledge. Today social feeds and LLMs have become how we figure out what everyone thinks. Can we trust them? I spent an afternoon with Steven Pinker finding out:
48:39

Why do dictatorships look permanent right up to the night they fall? Because a regime can survive a million private grievances. What it can't survive is everyone finding out that everyone agrees. Money, laws, revolutions — all run on common knowledge. Today social feeds and LLMs have become how we figure out what everyone thinks. Can we trust them? I spent an afternoon with Steven Pinker finding out:

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

71,162 次观看 • 5 天前

Australia. They say that in Australia there is a barrier that is forbidden to cross, I don't know if it's true. But I know that many old books showed us "Hybrids" beings, exotic animals, all very different from our reality. I don't know anything about the veracity of this video, but I think the authorities are hiding a lot of things from us. And if there is a possibility that there are beings beyond our knowledge, that place are Australia and beyond.
0:46

Australia. They say that in Australia there is a barrier that is forbidden to cross, I don't know if it's true. But I know that many old books showed us "Hybrids" beings, exotic animals, all very different from our reality. I don't know anything about the veracity of this video, but I think the authorities are hiding a lot of things from us. And if there is a possibility that there are beings beyond our knowledge, that place are Australia and beyond.

Bronze Giant

3,442,832 次观看 • 1 年前

"What is P vs NP and how does it relate to human knowledge?" Avi Wigderson (Turing Award & Abel Prize winner): "In a very basic way, all the problems we want to solve are really NP problems. A subset of it is the problems we can solve. So the question of P versus NP is whether we can solve all the problems we want to solve, whether we can know everything we want to know. This is basically about the limits of our knowledge. You can think there is no limit to what we may want to know but I claim that essentially in any human endeavor, what people are searching for have the property that when a solution is found, it is easily recognized. NP are all problems that we can honestly say we really want to solve and P are those that we can solve. Whether they are equal is just the very fact that a solution can be easily recognized would imply that it can be efficiently found. That means that we can know everything we ever want to know, it's a fundamental question about human knowledge."
1:00

"What is P vs NP and how does it relate to human knowledge?" Avi Wigderson (Turing Award & Abel Prize winner): "In a very basic way, all the problems we want to solve are really NP problems. A subset of it is the problems we can solve. So the question of P versus NP is whether we can solve all the problems we want to solve, whether we can know everything we want to know. This is basically about the limits of our knowledge. You can think there is no limit to what we may want to know but I claim that essentially in any human endeavor, what people are searching for have the property that when a solution is found, it is easily recognized. NP are all problems that we can honestly say we really want to solve and P are those that we can solve. Whether they are equal is just the very fact that a solution can be easily recognized would imply that it can be efficiently found. That means that we can know everything we ever want to know, it's a fundamental question about human knowledge."

Ryan Peterman

20,069 次观看 • 2 个月前

👀 Tucker Carlson Says There Are Two Stories That He is Really Scared to Cover "One is the 2020 election and I think that I was far too dismissive of some of the claims made about it and I think there may be some merit to some of the wildest possible claims about that election...The second thing that bothers me is the UFO story...If you talk to people who have actual knowledge of it that they gathered themselves, there are parts of that story that I do not understand at all that are really, really, really dark...There's a spiritual component there that I don't fully understand." Natali Morris Clayton Morris Tucker Carlson
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👀 Tucker Carlson Says There Are Two Stories That He is Really Scared to Cover "One is the 2020 election and I think that I was far too dismissive of some of the claims made about it and I think there may be some merit to some of the wildest possible claims about that election...The second thing that bothers me is the UFO story...If you talk to people who have actual knowledge of it that they gathered themselves, there are parts of that story that I do not understand at all that are really, really, really dark...There's a spiritual component there that I don't fully understand." Natali Morris Clayton Morris Tucker Carlson

Chief Nerd

6,083,017 次观看 • 2 年前

In the same way that you can be too sick to go to work, you can also be too mentally ill to date Especially if your mental illness is running rampant and impacting your dating life (BPD being a common one!) it’s better to take a step back than make things worse
1:52

In the same way that you can be too sick to go to work, you can also be too mentally ill to date Especially if your mental illness is running rampant and impacting your dating life (BPD being a common one!) it’s better to take a step back than make things worse

Allie ✞

43,925 次观看 • 5 个月前

TUCKER CARLSON: “I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks are like way better than Warren Buffett’s. How does that happen? Does anyone ever talk about that internally, like on the hill?” TULSI GABBARD: “No, because most of them benefit from it ... No member of Congress or the Senate or their spouse or their senior staff should be allowed to trade in stocks, period, full stop ... There should be no perception that our elected leaders are profiting off of the knowledge that they have as policymakers that directly impact industry and businesses. TUCKER CARLSON: “That’s a no-brainer to me.” TULSI GABBARD: “It’s just common sense that we have people in great positions of power. Why should they be forced to do something (not trade stocks while serving) with the passage of a law? Why don’t they just do the right thing and say, you know what, we get that even an innocent thing could be perceived as insider trading? We’re just not going to go there.” TUCKER CARLSON: “Because it’s too lucrative to give up.” TULSI GABBARD: “And they know they can get away with it.”
3:29

TUCKER CARLSON: “I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks are like way better than Warren Buffett’s. How does that happen? Does anyone ever talk about that internally, like on the hill?” TULSI GABBARD: “No, because most of them benefit from it ... No member of Congress or the Senate or their spouse or their senior staff should be allowed to trade in stocks, period, full stop ... There should be no perception that our elected leaders are profiting off of the knowledge that they have as policymakers that directly impact industry and businesses. TUCKER CARLSON: “That’s a no-brainer to me.” TULSI GABBARD: “It’s just common sense that we have people in great positions of power. Why should they be forced to do something (not trade stocks while serving) with the passage of a law? Why don’t they just do the right thing and say, you know what, we get that even an innocent thing could be perceived as insider trading? We’re just not going to go there.” TUCKER CARLSON: “Because it’s too lucrative to give up.” TULSI GABBARD: “And they know they can get away with it.”

The Vigilant Fox 🦊

1,072,821 次观看 • 2 年前

LeBron on if he can continue playing longer: "I could but I don't know. It's not like my game is deteriorating. I have so much knowledge of the game that I know how to still continue to make an impact. I can still do so many things on the floor" 🥹❤️
1:33

LeBron on if he can continue playing longer: "I could but I don't know. It's not like my game is deteriorating. I have so much knowledge of the game that I know how to still continue to make an impact. I can still do so many things on the floor" 🥹❤️

BronMuse

402,442 次观看 • 6 个月前