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Using local knowledge for road widening and landslide prevention in #Uttarakhand : This landslide happened yesterday morning at a location that is around 25 km from #Uttarakashi on way to #Gangotri. I was informed by one of the nation's most well respected scientists and geologist Dr Navin Juyal that...

15,326 次观看 • 11 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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.Logan on our latest piece in Human Progress about what unifies the enemies of civilization: What unifies all of the enemies of civilization is that they all slow down the growth of knowledge. Now, you ask, how can we take advantage of this fact, namely that all of the enemies of civilization share in common this feature that they curb the growth of knowledge? This fact tells us that we can, if we so choose and if we make the right decisions, outpace them in the growth of knowledge. So, one strategy to defeat the enemies of civilization is basically to outpace them in this great war of memes and growing wealth and knowledge, such that eventually, the memes that comprise the enemies of civilization, as well as the wealth that the enemies of civilization control, is an ever smaller fraction of the total meme pool and wealth that civilization has to offer. So, this is what success would look like if we think about outpacing them. But there's also the strategy of replacing the memes that comprise the enemies of civilization with better ideas. This is just a fancy way of saying we could also persuade people. So that would be a kind of inside-out approach, rather than the out-pacing, which is kind of from the outside in. And of course, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can continue to build and outpace the enemies of civilization while persuading people that the relevant ideas that curb the growth of knowledge are mistaken. And by the way, just to make the conversation a little less abstract, the enemies of civilization that we wrote about in our piece, which is an excerpt of the script we wrote for your upcoming documentary, those enemies are socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism. And I don't think I ever told you this, Arjun, but what I like about the list we came up with is that understanding the inner workings of each of these enemies of civilization, that is to say, understanding the how and why of how each enemy of civilization curbs the growth of knowledge, gives unique insights into the nature of progress and epistemology. This clip was recorded and made using Airchat.

Arjun Khemani

23,776 次观看 • 1 年前

I think we've been deprived of a lot more than flying cars and Mars colonies. I think civilization is currently burdened by a debilitating pessimism. Not just prophecies of doom, because they've always existed. There's something deeper. The term technological fix has become as pejorative as Luddite used to be. The aspiration for technological solutions is now widely regarded as naive. A fantasy that ignores the inevitability of missteps and side effects. And that naivety is labeled optimism. Because optimism has come to mean something like the assumption that the best will happen, or probably will. And pessimism that the worst will. They're both false as general principles. No one adopts them. They're irrationalities that people accuse each other of having. And everyone classifies themselves as somewhere in the middle. And perhaps admitting to a slight bias in one direction or the other. And therefore admitting to slight irrationality. But in fact, both ends of the spectrum and the middle are predictions of success or failure. Maybe probabilistic. Derived only from an attitude or a principle. Not from explanations of why reality should match them. And prediction without explanation is prophecy. Which is reliance on the supernatural. Which isn't a rational attitude to planning for the future. So what is? Well, here's the bad news. Conventional pessimism is right that civilization has no guaranteed future. Nor does our species. The overwhelming majority of civilizations and species that have ever existed are now extinct. Including significantly every one of our cousin species. Every species that has ever tried to survive by creating knowledge that was not in their genome. New explanatory knowledge. How to make clothes and fire and farming. And to live the new ways of life that that enabled. That is our biological niche. To survive through the exercise of creativity. And we are the last species left in that niche. For such species, stasis is not available. We conquer problems by creating knowledge or they conquer us. So there's nothing new in our situation of all sorts of existential danger. It's undeniable that the worst can happen. Because the very worst has already happened many times. So now for the good news. All those civilizations who believed that their famines and droughts and disasters were divine punishment for their wickedness or whatever. In reality, it was just that they didn't know enough about irrigation, medicine, and so on. If the ancient Athenians had known about antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their nascent optimistic society. And if they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars. And technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate. As automatically as it's now regulating the temperature in this room. We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural. Namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge. And hence, the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism. The principle of optimism, namely that all evils are caused by lack of knowledge. That isn't a prophecy of success. It's an explanation for failure. If we fail at anything that's physically possible, it's because of some knowledge that we fail to create. Admittedly, some of the dangers that we currently foresee are themselves side effects of knowledge creation. But trying to slow that down won't help because what do you slow down? In 1900, no one could possibly have foreseen that research in pure physics into the esoteric properties of the element uranium would within 50 years become the centerpiece of everyone's existential fear. Or that another half century later, the centerpiece would be carbon dioxide. In our future too, the greatest dangers will inevitably be unforeseen. And the only type of knowledge that's capable of dealing with those is fundamental knowledge of universal regularities in nature. Any area of fundamental research could suddenly become essential to our survival. Biology, engineering. In World War II, pure mathematics was. We also need knowledge of how to structure human institutions to retain the miraculous property of keeping civilization stable under rapid change. Traditions of criticism and error correction. And we need wealth, meaning the ability to deploy technology in practice. And there's a final consideration. The world doesn't just contain optimists and pessimists and wise and unwise technology users. It contains enemies of civilization as well. And knowledge is impartial. It can be used for good or evil. But the enemies of civilization all necessarily have one thing in common. They are wrong. And so they fear error correction and truth. And that's why they resist changes in their ideas, which makes them less creative and slower to innovate. So our defense against the existential danger from malevolent uses of technology, the only defense, is speed. The good guys must use their only advantage to stay ahead. David Deutsch

Deutsch Explains

38,267 次观看 • 1 年前

.Naval: You have a beautiful definition of knowledge, which most people don’t even try to tackle, about how knowledge perpetuates itself in the environment. You gave some really good examples. One was around genes. Successful, highly adapted genes contain a lot of knowledge and can cause themselves to be replicated because they’re survivors. In the same way, knowledge itself is a survivor, in that if you transmit to me the knowledge of how to build a computer, it’s an incredibly useful thing. I’m going to build more and more computers and that knowledge will be passed on. Your underlying point that you repeated here was if you want to understand the physical universe you have to understand knowledge, because it is the thing that over time takes over and changes more and more the universe—more than almost anything else. You have to understand all the explanations behind it. You can’t just say “particle collisions” because that explains everything, so it explains nothing. It’s not a useful level to operate at. Therefore, the things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe. And as far as we know, there are only two systems that create knowledge. There’s evolution and there are humans. But is there a difference even between these two forms of knowledge creation, between evolution and between humans? David Deutsch: Yes. I have argued that the human way of creating knowledge is the ultimate one, that there aren’t any more powerful ones than that. This is the argument against the supernatural. Assuming that there is a form of knowledge creation that’s more powerful than ours is equivalent to invoking the supernatural, which is therefore a bad explanation—as invoking the supernatural always is. The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution. Whenever biological evolution produces a solution to something, it’s always before natural selection has even begun. This is Charles Darwin’s insight. This is the difference between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the other theories of evolution that had been around for a century or more before that, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather and Lamarck. The thing they didn’t get is that the creation of knowledge in evolution begins before. That means that biological evolution can’t reach places that are not reachable by successive improvements, each of which allows a viable organism to exist. Creationists say that biological evolution has, in fact, reached things that are not reachable by incremental steps, each of which is a viable organism. They’re factually mistaken. The thing which they have in mind is the idea of a creator who can imagine things that don’t exist and who can create an idea that is not the culmination of a whole load of viable things. A thinking being can create something that’s a culmination of a whole load of non-viable things. Explanatory creativity makes humans unique Out of all the billions and billions of species that have ever existed, none of them has ever made a campfire, even though many of them would’ve been helped by having the genetic capacity to make campfires. The reason it didn’t happen in the biosphere is that there is no such thing as making a partially functional campfire; whereas there is, for example, with making hot water. The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen. Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

Deutsch Explains

186,329 次观看 • 1 年前