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We keep inheriting knowledge we’re not ready to survive! I spent a few days putting this presentation together, that explores the recurring pattern found across ancient civilizations. Where knowledge is given, humanity advances, and then destabilizes when wisdom fails to keep up!. It looks at how this same structure...

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.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

143,913 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

.David Deutsch: “There is an inherent conflict in the human condition—both individually and in society—between the need to preserve existing knowledge and the need to create new knowledge. For most of human history, preserving existing knowledge trumped any kind of attempt to improve knowledge. Because attempts to improve knowledge risk error. Or rather, to be exact, it risks error that has never occurred before. There were plenty of errors that had occurred before. Plenty of kings got overthrown because they couldn’t solve the problem of how to fend off the enemy. But they were in familiar territory conceptually, and they were afraid of changing culture. This fear of changing culture was built into culture itself. And this conflict exists to this day. The most extreme example known to me in the West, anyway, is the conflict in education between preserving existing knowledge and creating new knowledge. Even today, education—education theory—is conceived as the theory of how to decant existing knowledge from the brains that already know it to the brains that do not yet know it. And that’s what Popper calls the ‘bucket theory of the mind’—that the mind is a bucket and knowledge is a fluid. What he stressed, and what I always also want to stress, is that not only is that a mischaracterization of knowledge and of the use of knowledge, but it is the wrong way around. As a practical matter, even right back two million years ago, the transmission of cultural knowledge was not something done by the transmitter; it was something done by the receiver.”

Arjun Khemani

10,523 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr