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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...

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Steven Pinker

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I recount a joke from the old Soviet Union: a man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrested him and bring him back to headquarters. Only they discover the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him: "What is the meaning of this?" He says, “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” So the point of the joke was, he was generating subversive common knowledge. That is, the citizens of the Soviet Union, they all knew that the regime was inefficient and cruel and oppressive, but each one may have thought that they were the only one, that everyone else was happy. Or they may even have thought that everyone else was aggrieved the way they are, but they didn’t know that everyone else was. And so everyone just kept their misery to themselves. By just making it public, making it common knowledge that there’s a reason to oppose the regime, that can unite people in opposition and can really bring down a regime. Thinkable
1:01

I recount a joke from the old Soviet Union: a man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrested him and bring him back to headquarters. Only they discover the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him: "What is the meaning of this?" He says, “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” So the point of the joke was, he was generating subversive common knowledge. That is, the citizens of the Soviet Union, they all knew that the regime was inefficient and cruel and oppressive, but each one may have thought that they were the only one, that everyone else was happy. Or they may even have thought that everyone else was aggrieved the way they are, but they didn’t know that everyone else was. And so everyone just kept their misery to themselves. By just making it public, making it common knowledge that there’s a reason to oppose the regime, that can unite people in opposition and can really bring down a regime. Thinkable

Steven Pinker

70,188 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

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 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

Dr P Arora (Pooja Arora) and I spoke about cancel culture and common knowledge, the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Me: Yeah, so cancel culture is one of the phenomena that has surrounded what’s sometimes called the Great Awokening. It’s a humorous term based on the Great Awakening, which was an era in American history where there was a huge multiplication of Protestant churches and of religious fervor in the 19th century. That was the Great Awakening, and so the joke is it’s the Great Awokening, probably starting maybe around 2014, but then it really exploded in 2020 in the United States with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But anyway, cancel culture, which is not restricted to the left, to wokeism—and in fact, in the United States in the last year, we’ve seen an eruption of cancel culture from the populist MAGA Trumpian right, especially after the killing of Charlie Kirk—where the same things that were happening in woke culture, namely someone would have a tweet or a comment that seemed disrespectful of the dominant ideology, and they would get threatened, they would get censored, they would get fired. So in my book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, one of the chapters is called The Cancelling Instinct. It’s a bit of a play on my book, The Language Instinct. It just asks the question: since it is not only the woke left, but it can also be the MAGA right—and to say nothing of the fascist right or the Nazi right—to repress speech, the question is why? Why do we feel the urge to shut up people we disagree with? Particularly since one of the principles of the Enlightenment, and of science and democracy, is that you need to have free speech, because none of us is infallible. The only way we make progress is that people—everyone—express an opinion; other people are free to criticize those opinions; and it is in the crucible of debate and criticism that we see which ideas are good, which ones are true, which ones are errors that we should discard. I suggest the reason that there is such an urge to cancel is that we all are—we live by moral norms, not just by laws where the police will arrest you and put you on trial and put you in jail if you break a law. And that happens. But we have many more norms of how we live our lives, where people don’t do something because, you know, everyone knows you don’t do it. Why does everyone know? Well, everyone knows that everyone else knows you don’t do it. You don’t walk around naked. You don’t eat mashed potatoes with your hands. You don’t insult people to their faces. You don’t point out—if someone is overweight or has a speech impediment—there are dozens of these norms. And some of the norms are: you don’t make racist comments. You don’t make comments that demean women or gay people. What upholds these norms? Common knowledge. They exist because everyone knows they exist, which means that if it appears that a norm is threatened—crucially, in a public arena where it could be common knowledge—then there is an urge to punish that person, but also publicly. That is, in an arena of common knowledge. That is where everyone can see the punishment, and everyone can see everyone else seeing the punishment. That’s what’s necessary to prop up a norm, and that, I think, gives rise to the urge to censor and cancel, often in highly public ways. Now, in the old days, it used to be that there were public hangings and public crucifixions and burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures or the social media shaming mob, but I think the underlying psychology is the same. Now, in some cases, this could be positive. That is, it really is good that we don’t insult each other to our faces, that we don’t tell racist jokes, which were very common when I grew up. On the other hand, in arenas like science, democracy, the rule of law, the truth is more important than social harmony, and the whole point of scholarship, academia, of science is that you find the truth even when the truth seems uncomfortable. And so cancel culture can get in the way of our collective effort to acquire knowledge.
4:54

Dr P Arora (Pooja Arora) and I spoke about cancel culture and common knowledge, the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . . Me: Yeah, so cancel culture is one of the phenomena that has surrounded what’s sometimes called the Great Awokening. It’s a humorous term based on the Great Awakening, which was an era in American history where there was a huge multiplication of Protestant churches and of religious fervor in the 19th century. That was the Great Awakening, and so the joke is it’s the Great Awokening, probably starting maybe around 2014, but then it really exploded in 2020 in the United States with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But anyway, cancel culture, which is not restricted to the left, to wokeism—and in fact, in the United States in the last year, we’ve seen an eruption of cancel culture from the populist MAGA Trumpian right, especially after the killing of Charlie Kirk—where the same things that were happening in woke culture, namely someone would have a tweet or a comment that seemed disrespectful of the dominant ideology, and they would get threatened, they would get censored, they would get fired. So in my book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, one of the chapters is called The Cancelling Instinct. It’s a bit of a play on my book, The Language Instinct. It just asks the question: since it is not only the woke left, but it can also be the MAGA right—and to say nothing of the fascist right or the Nazi right—to repress speech, the question is why? Why do we feel the urge to shut up people we disagree with? Particularly since one of the principles of the Enlightenment, and of science and democracy, is that you need to have free speech, because none of us is infallible. The only way we make progress is that people—everyone—express an opinion; other people are free to criticize those opinions; and it is in the crucible of debate and criticism that we see which ideas are good, which ones are true, which ones are errors that we should discard. I suggest the reason that there is such an urge to cancel is that we all are—we live by moral norms, not just by laws where the police will arrest you and put you on trial and put you in jail if you break a law. And that happens. But we have many more norms of how we live our lives, where people don’t do something because, you know, everyone knows you don’t do it. Why does everyone know? Well, everyone knows that everyone else knows you don’t do it. You don’t walk around naked. You don’t eat mashed potatoes with your hands. You don’t insult people to their faces. You don’t point out—if someone is overweight or has a speech impediment—there are dozens of these norms. And some of the norms are: you don’t make racist comments. You don’t make comments that demean women or gay people. What upholds these norms? Common knowledge. They exist because everyone knows they exist, which means that if it appears that a norm is threatened—crucially, in a public arena where it could be common knowledge—then there is an urge to punish that person, but also publicly. That is, in an arena of common knowledge. That is where everyone can see the punishment, and everyone can see everyone else seeing the punishment. That’s what’s necessary to prop up a norm, and that, I think, gives rise to the urge to censor and cancel, often in highly public ways. Now, in the old days, it used to be that there were public hangings and public crucifixions and burnings at the stake. The electronic equivalent is the internet petition with 600 signatures or the social media shaming mob, but I think the underlying psychology is the same. Now, in some cases, this could be positive. That is, it really is good that we don’t insult each other to our faces, that we don’t tell racist jokes, which were very common when I grew up. On the other hand, in arenas like science, democracy, the rule of law, the truth is more important than social harmony, and the whole point of scholarship, academia, of science is that you find the truth even when the truth seems uncomfortable. And so cancel culture can get in the way of our collective effort to acquire knowledge.

Steven Pinker

63,587 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

I had the pleasure of being a guest on Science of Perception Box, a video podcast from Unlikely Collaborators. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Me: Eye contact can often generate common knowledge. We know, even from the ethological literature in animal communication, that eye contact is a very potent signal because 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 that’s looking at the part of you. And so eye contact can generate common knowledge. It often resolves ambiguities in, say, a car stopping and a pedestrian crossing. Establishing eye contact would be a way of generating that common knowledge. Christof Koch: Or two cars merging on a freeway, right? The other guy sort of briefly nods. Me: Exactly. And in fact, I was tickled to see a sign in the San Francisco airport parking lot, which I actually photographed and included in the book. It has a cartoon of a pedestrian and a driver, with a dashed line joining their eyes, and it says, “Make eye contact before crossing.” There it is. Yes. Dr. Heather Berlin
1:03

I had the pleasure of being a guest on Science of Perception Box, a video podcast from Unlikely Collaborators. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Me: Eye contact can often generate common knowledge. We know, even from the ethological literature in animal communication, that eye contact is a very potent signal because 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 that’s looking at the part of you. And so eye contact can generate common knowledge. It often resolves ambiguities in, say, a car stopping and a pedestrian crossing. Establishing eye contact would be a way of generating that common knowledge. Christof Koch: Or two cars merging on a freeway, right? The other guy sort of briefly nods. Me: Exactly. And in fact, I was tickled to see a sign in the San Francisco airport parking lot, which I actually photographed and included in the book. It has a cartoon of a pedestrian and a driver, with a dashed line joining their eyes, and it says, “Make eye contact before crossing.” There it is. Yes. Dr. Heather Berlin

Steven Pinker

32,076 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen

Me: What the Trump administration is doing by this trolling—by this contempt for standards of evidence, truth, sound argument—is what many dictators have done. Namely, not so much lie, because people can see through lies. But just as Steve Bannon put it, flood the zone with—we're on the radio—so, flood the zone with feces; he didn’t use the word feces. That is, spread so much nonsense, some things that are true, some things that are false, that people just feel there’s no way to tell the difference, and so they just accept what the powerful leader says. That is, you undermine the feeling that there’s any basis to distinguish truth from falsehood. Meaning, well, then what are you going to believe? Well, believe what the leader says. Adam Boulton: And that is, you know, making common knowledge toxic to a certain extent, isn’t it? Me: Yes, it’s spreading the common belief that works in the interests of the powerful leader, the sovereign, the dictator, the chief, at the expense of the democratic principle that the government serves the interests of the people. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me that because America is so dominant and so large, that it is something that is spreading out into political discourse in other countries. You know, people talk about being like Trump, or Trump’s got a point, or things like that. Do you see that coming here? Me: Yeah, I think that is a danger. I mean, I think there were hints of that during the administration of Boris Johnson, who has been called Trump with a thesaurus. But there was some of that trolling, some of that not being quite serious—you never knew whether he was joshing or not—which is less benign than it might seem. It’s not just that he has a sense of humor, but by just fuzzing the border between truth and exaggeration and trolling, it meant that you’re in a position where you may as well believe what the leader says, because the whole atmosphere of knowing has been so polluted that there’s no way of determining what’s true or false. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me—I don’t know if you’d agree—that there’s a tremendous amount of gaslighting, that the fault which Trump or the administration is manifesting, they then accuse their opponents of having. You know, it’s not me, it’s you. Me: Exactly, that kind of naked partisanship: I’m right, people who disagree with me are bad, whatever it is that they say, and I never make a mistake, anything I say is true, is another tactic of control. And indeed, gaslighting—which is like the emperor’s new clothes, the elephant in the room—where people know something privately, but they are punished for saying it publicly, with the result that you can be in a situation where everyone knows something, mistakenly thinks that no one else knows it, whereas everyone really does know it. And that spiral of silence, as it’s sometimes called, can happen when the expression of beliefs is punished. With Adam Boulton of Times Radio (Times Radio):
3:21

Me: What the Trump administration is doing by this trolling—by this contempt for standards of evidence, truth, sound argument—is what many dictators have done. Namely, not so much lie, because people can see through lies. But just as Steve Bannon put it, flood the zone with—we're on the radio—so, flood the zone with feces; he didn’t use the word feces. That is, spread so much nonsense, some things that are true, some things that are false, that people just feel there’s no way to tell the difference, and so they just accept what the powerful leader says. That is, you undermine the feeling that there’s any basis to distinguish truth from falsehood. Meaning, well, then what are you going to believe? Well, believe what the leader says. Adam Boulton: And that is, you know, making common knowledge toxic to a certain extent, isn’t it? Me: Yes, it’s spreading the common belief that works in the interests of the powerful leader, the sovereign, the dictator, the chief, at the expense of the democratic principle that the government serves the interests of the people. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me that because America is so dominant and so large, that it is something that is spreading out into political discourse in other countries. You know, people talk about being like Trump, or Trump’s got a point, or things like that. Do you see that coming here? Me: Yeah, I think that is a danger. I mean, I think there were hints of that during the administration of Boris Johnson, who has been called Trump with a thesaurus. But there was some of that trolling, some of that not being quite serious—you never knew whether he was joshing or not—which is less benign than it might seem. It’s not just that he has a sense of humor, but by just fuzzing the border between truth and exaggeration and trolling, it meant that you’re in a position where you may as well believe what the leader says, because the whole atmosphere of knowing has been so polluted that there’s no way of determining what’s true or false. Adam Boulton: It also seems to me—I don’t know if you’d agree—that there’s a tremendous amount of gaslighting, that the fault which Trump or the administration is manifesting, they then accuse their opponents of having. You know, it’s not me, it’s you. Me: Exactly, that kind of naked partisanship: I’m right, people who disagree with me are bad, whatever it is that they say, and I never make a mistake, anything I say is true, is another tactic of control. And indeed, gaslighting—which is like the emperor’s new clothes, the elephant in the room—where people know something privately, but they are punished for saying it publicly, with the result that you can be in a situation where everyone knows something, mistakenly thinks that no one else knows it, whereas everyone really does know it. And that spiral of silence, as it’s sometimes called, can happen when the expression of beliefs is punished. With Adam Boulton of Times Radio (Times Radio):

Steven Pinker

82,182 Aufrufe • vor 11 Monaten

.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.
4:31

.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

186,454 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

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 knowledge? COWEN: For a while now, we’ve had this thing called anonymous posters on the internet. Do you think, on average, they make the world better or worse? PINKER: Interesting. Probably worse. COWEN: They help make some things common knowledge. If there are things that are not common knowledge, some anonymous poster will say it. There’ll also be misinformation. Is that a clue that maybe at the margin, we have too much common knowledge rather than too little?
5:32

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 knowledge? COWEN: For a while now, we’ve had this thing called anonymous posters on the internet. Do you think, on average, they make the world better or worse? PINKER: Interesting. Probably worse. COWEN: They help make some things common knowledge. If there are things that are not common knowledge, some anonymous poster will say it. There’ll also be misinformation. Is that a clue that maybe at the margin, we have too much common knowledge rather than too little?

Conversations with Tyler

22,286 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

.Naval: Epistemology, which is a fancy word for the theory of how knowledge grows or how knowledge growth occurs. And we've all been told since we're young that there's a scientific method and that scientists sort of do this stuff in white lab coats and we're supposed to accept it because of this thing called the scientific method. And then they give us true beliefs that we can then say, well the science is settled and we take that we move on. And we all only have a very, very vague understanding of how this works. And people say, well maybe you go out in the real world, you look at what's happening, you make all these observations, and then based on that you form a theory, you test the theory against more observations, and the more observations you get the closer you get to the truth. And once you have enough observation it's true and then you call it a scientific theory or a law and it's settled and you move on. And this is the popular conception of how science works. And as Popper pointed out and as you take even further, this is completely wrong. And so I'd love for you to get into that, which is what is knowledge? How does it grow? What is the real scientific method? And how do we figure things out? David Deutsch: I love the way you just stated the prevailing view there and laced every aspect of it with the contempt that it deserves. So you just went through touching every base. It's amazing that this series of misconceptions is still common sense. I mean, that it was common sense at a time when we didn't really have science or when science was just starting up, when the main issue in science was freeing itself from dogmatism, freeing itself from religion, freeing itself from authority, and so on. There it was understandable that people would look for an alternative source of authority and they would think, oh, it's sense impressions. We can see the world and you know, these religious people, they can't even see God and so on. And so we are confined to what we can see. That's where we get our ideas from. And as you say, that is completely false. Sense impressions, like all observation, even the most careful scientific observation is all theory laden. And theories are inherently fallible. I mean, we actually want to replace our best theories. Everybody who does a PhD is technically anyway, working to overturn something in the existing body of knowledge. You're not turned away at the door if you say, I don't believe this stuff, I'm going to produce something better. Whereas for most of human history, that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you want to discover something new, what you had to make sure of was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge. Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict existing knowledge. So more or less. Naval: Yeah, it's this tradition of criticism that you've talked about in the West, that the Enlightenment really ushered in the Enlightenment era. David Deutsch: It has been institutionalized. So in many ways, our institutions are wiser than we are. So the institutions of science, for instance, have this built in, even if scientists actually don't always act that way. In fact, they often don't act that way, and act in a dogmatic way and try to preserve the status quo and are resistant to new ideas and so on. But the institutions, the way the procedures of science work, makes the right thing happen in the end anyway, regardless of what the people are trying to do. Naval: So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of science in the PhD process? David Deutsch: Well, the best scientific method that we know of, and one shouldn't really think of it as a method, you know, there's this wonderful lecture by Popper when he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method, and his first six lectures, I wish the rest of them were, the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere. And he starts the first one by saying, I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. The British Empire still existed at the time, more or less. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. And then he goes on from there. So this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out the other end, you're going to be disappointed.
4:50

.Naval: Epistemology, which is a fancy word for the theory of how knowledge grows or how knowledge growth occurs. And we've all been told since we're young that there's a scientific method and that scientists sort of do this stuff in white lab coats and we're supposed to accept it because of this thing called the scientific method. And then they give us true beliefs that we can then say, well the science is settled and we take that we move on. And we all only have a very, very vague understanding of how this works. And people say, well maybe you go out in the real world, you look at what's happening, you make all these observations, and then based on that you form a theory, you test the theory against more observations, and the more observations you get the closer you get to the truth. And once you have enough observation it's true and then you call it a scientific theory or a law and it's settled and you move on. And this is the popular conception of how science works. And as Popper pointed out and as you take even further, this is completely wrong. And so I'd love for you to get into that, which is what is knowledge? How does it grow? What is the real scientific method? And how do we figure things out? David Deutsch: I love the way you just stated the prevailing view there and laced every aspect of it with the contempt that it deserves. So you just went through touching every base. It's amazing that this series of misconceptions is still common sense. I mean, that it was common sense at a time when we didn't really have science or when science was just starting up, when the main issue in science was freeing itself from dogmatism, freeing itself from religion, freeing itself from authority, and so on. There it was understandable that people would look for an alternative source of authority and they would think, oh, it's sense impressions. We can see the world and you know, these religious people, they can't even see God and so on. And so we are confined to what we can see. That's where we get our ideas from. And as you say, that is completely false. Sense impressions, like all observation, even the most careful scientific observation is all theory laden. And theories are inherently fallible. I mean, we actually want to replace our best theories. Everybody who does a PhD is technically anyway, working to overturn something in the existing body of knowledge. You're not turned away at the door if you say, I don't believe this stuff, I'm going to produce something better. Whereas for most of human history, that was exactly what you were forbidden to do. The idea was that we already had all the important knowledge. If you want to discover something new, what you had to make sure of was that it didn't contradict the existing knowledge. Now, you have to make sure that it does contradict existing knowledge. So more or less. Naval: Yeah, it's this tradition of criticism that you've talked about in the West, that the Enlightenment really ushered in the Enlightenment era. David Deutsch: It has been institutionalized. So in many ways, our institutions are wiser than we are. So the institutions of science, for instance, have this built in, even if scientists actually don't always act that way. In fact, they often don't act that way, and act in a dogmatic way and try to preserve the status quo and are resistant to new ideas and so on. But the institutions, the way the procedures of science work, makes the right thing happen in the end anyway, regardless of what the people are trying to do. Naval: So you're saying the knowledge of the true scientific method is embedded in the institutions of science in the PhD process? David Deutsch: Well, the best scientific method that we know of, and one shouldn't really think of it as a method, you know, there's this wonderful lecture by Popper when he first was made a professor at the London School of Economics. He was made a professor of scientific method, and his first six lectures, I wish the rest of them were, the first six lectures are on the internet somewhere. And he starts the first one by saying, I am the first professor of scientific method in the British Empire. The British Empire still existed at the time, more or less. And so the first thing I want to say to you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method. And then he goes on from there. So this subject does not exist. So if any of you have come here to learn the handle that you have to turn in order to make scientific knowledge come out the other end, you're going to be disappointed.

Deutsch Explains

116,352 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

.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 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

🚨 WOW! Stephen Miller just exposed it: "Some people might not like what I'm about to say, but it has to be said. You have the Left continue in its professional associations like nursing and doctors and education — people who casually CHEER ASSASSINATIONS." "Their conversation is: 'I'm glad that so and so was shot,' or 'I'm mad that so and so didn't finish the job.'" "This is common now in white-collar professions that are controlled by Democrat credentialing bodies, is it creates this kind of person." "And it's SICK, and when you see it online, you see it also in left-wing comedy where they cheer and they laugh and they joke and they all have a good time talking about our friends getting m*rdered!" "It's really fundamentally the normalization of assassination — and if we don't deal with this, we're in for a world of pain and a world of HURT." "It's just, it's sickening and it's heinous and it's just repugnant in every single way. But this gets back to the theme that I'm presenting today, which is that the third worldification of American politics is the normalization of assassination." "It's the normalization of the idea that assassinations are a common expression of disagreement. It is one of the most vile, horrible, evil society destroying things that can possibly happen to a country." Stephen Miller Will Cain
1:50

🚨 WOW! Stephen Miller just exposed it: "Some people might not like what I'm about to say, but it has to be said. You have the Left continue in its professional associations like nursing and doctors and education — people who casually CHEER ASSASSINATIONS." "Their conversation is: 'I'm glad that so and so was shot,' or 'I'm mad that so and so didn't finish the job.'" "This is common now in white-collar professions that are controlled by Democrat credentialing bodies, is it creates this kind of person." "And it's SICK, and when you see it online, you see it also in left-wing comedy where they cheer and they laugh and they joke and they all have a good time talking about our friends getting m*rdered!" "It's really fundamentally the normalization of assassination — and if we don't deal with this, we're in for a world of pain and a world of HURT." "It's just, it's sickening and it's heinous and it's just repugnant in every single way. But this gets back to the theme that I'm presenting today, which is that the third worldification of American politics is the normalization of assassination." "It's the normalization of the idea that assassinations are a common expression of disagreement. It is one of the most vile, horrible, evil society destroying things that can possibly happen to a country." Stephen Miller Will Cain

Eric Daugherty

100,938 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten