2011-08-29 David Deutsch radio interview on KERA's "Think" with Krys Boyd (transcript)

[Josh Jordan]

Here is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on
KERA's "Think" with Krys Boyd on August 29, 2011. The audio is
available at http://www.kera.org/2011/08/29/explanations-that-transform-the-world/

Krys Boyd: You're listening to Think on KERA 90.1. I'm Krys Boyd. Does
understanding the universe give us the power to control the universe?
Humans have sought to explain the workings of the natural world for
millennia and have used the methods of modern science with ever
greater effectiveness since the Enlightenment. We've learned to do
things that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined, from global
telecommunications to life-saving medical treatments to tracing the
history of the universe to within seconds of the Big Bang. And my
guest today will argue that while there was a beginning to humankind's
scientific achievement, there is no reason to believe our achievements
will someday reach an end point. Given what we know about ourselves,
he is hopeful that our acquisition and application of scientific
knowledge could last as long as the universe itself. David Deutsch is
a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Physics at Oxford
University. His new book is called "The Beginning of Infinity:
Explanations that Transform the World". David, welcome to Think.

David Deutsch: Hi, Krys. Thanks for inviting me.

Boyd: You write that, "All progress comes from the human quest for
good explanations." How has our definition of a "good explanation"
evolved over the centuries?

Deutsch: One of the most noticeable changes that happened in the
history of our species was the scientific revolution, which made the
difference between making progress that was either absent or so slow
that no human ever noticed it in their lifetime, and what's happened
since then, which is that we've got used to change happening all the
time and being part of our lives. And because that change was so
noticeable, people wondered what caused it. Initially, they got all
sorts of wrong theories about what it was that made science
successful, and some truths as well. For example, it was realized
almost immediately that rejecting authority was a necessary condition
for making progress. That is, authority in regard to knowledge, though
this spread to political authority as well. But then, in the positive
sense, what actually caused science, people got really confused and
thought that we kind of absorbed knowledge of nature by being open to
experience, and that experience somehow implanted true ideas about the
world in our minds. Now, this is completely untrue, and one of the
things I do in the book is trace how wrong that is and also how the
real explanation, which is that we seek hard-to-vary explanations,
applies not only in science, but in all sorts of other fields,
including art, morality, political philosophy, and so on.

Boyd: It's so interesting, David, to reflect on the idea that the
before the Enlightenment, many people, learned people, assumed that
everything worth knowing had already been revealed. Today, that lack
of curiosity strikes us as almost dangerous.

Deutsch: Yes. It's basically very implausible today, because we're all
hoping and expecting that improvements will be made. The whole of
politics is about who has the best idea for improvements and so on.
It's difficult to imagine, but if you try to imagine what it was like
during most of human history when nobody ever experienced an
improvement in anything, then, in regard to knowledge, it was sort of
common sense that there was this thing called knowledge. We knew that
the sun would rise every day, but there was nothing new to discover,
because all that was going to happen tomorrow was that the sun would
rise again just like it did today.

Boyd: What's the relationship between curiosity and intelligence?

Deutsch: Curiosity, I think, is a way of referring to the desire for
good explanations. It's a way of thinking that there's something here
that we don't know, or some problem, some puzzle, for which we would
like to have the explanation, that is, a statement about reality which
explains why the thing we are curious about is as it is.
Intelligence... Well, I shy away from that word, because it is laden
with this wrong idea of where knowledge comes from. The idea of
intelligence is that there is some ability that allows us to get good
knowledge. But in fact, knowledge comes from criticism, it comes from
conjecture about what might be better than the ideas we have. And
conjecture is fallible. So, curiosity is great. Intelligence, I think,
is a misleading term, and I'd rather refer to things like criticism
and creativity.

Boyd: I find it fascinating that many of the scientists we speak to on
this program have a similar philosophy about intelligence. They're the
last people to say that being a physicist is tantamount to being a
genius. And there are a lot of people in other fields who don't have
any problem at all feeling as if they are very intelligent.

Deutsch: I do think that it's a disservice to humankind to promote the
view that success in anything intellectual is due to something innate.
It's not due to an innate ability, because there is no such ability
possible. It is only due to a critical attitude, an open attitude, a
desire for truth, that sort of thing. And abilities are knowledge
themselves. They are things that we learn in the course of trying to
discover the truth.

Boyd: Can we trust ourselves to use our newly gained abilities for
good rather than evil?

Deutsch: This is part of the question of whether the spectacular
growth of knowledge that has happened in science can happen in other
fields as well, and the one you are asking about is morality. I think
that the answer must be, "Yes, there is such a thing as an objective
difference between right and wrong." And although it's easy to be
cynical and look around at all the evils there are in the world and
also at all the disagreements about right and wrong that there are in
the world, I think if you look more deeply and over a longer time
scale, you can easily see that there is progress and that it's not
just a matter of cultural prejudice or just a matter of definitions.
For example, there was a time, only a few hundred years ago, when
every reasonable person would have thought that slavery is a natural
state of some people, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with
it. Whereas now, you'll hardly find any thinking person who doesn't
agree that it is a great evil, and that steps could and should be made
to abolish it.

Boyd: Let's talk about some of the ways that we've physically changed
the world that we live in. For example, a lot of modern cities today
are shaped as much by human intervention as by geologic forces. Will
you talk about that a little bit?

Deutsch: A city is the obvious example of what I think is a general
truth. Remember, we're only at the beginning of infinity and always
will be and on Earth, we're only at the beginning of shaping it, but a
city is an example of the fact once knowledge is involved in physical
processes, it is the determining factor of the landscape. That is,
whereas other species, the ones that are incapable of generating
knowledge, are shaped by and adapted to their landscape, humans create
their own landscape and shape it and adapt it. So, for humans, there
is no such thing as a resource until some human has developed the
knowledge for making it a resource. I think that if we choose to do
the right thing and continue to use knowledge and to seek better
things and progress, then this will extend to anything and everything.
We'll move off the planet and improve things as we go. But, no doubt
many people will be thinking as I say this, cities and things haven't
always improved things; there's pollution and so on. But I think this
is a myth of a rosy past. It's no good thinking of a rosy past in
which the rivers were clean the air was pure, if people at that time
actually were plagued by cholera.

Boyd: I want to talk about something like global warming. You are
confident that we will be able to survive it given that in the past we
have used our technologies and our intellects to survive inhospitable
climates which occurred naturally all over the planet.

Deutsch: Yes. Global warming is one of the first global challenges
that we face as a result of technology or improving things. We've
improved a whole lot of things, and as a result, a slow worsening has
happened in part of our environment. Now, this has happened on a
smaller scale thousands of times. I'm old enough to remember when many
of the cities in England had smog, and the London fog was deemed to be
part of the London scene. It wasn't even thought of as a thing that
humans could undo. And yet, as technology improved, wealth increased,
and standards raised, the London fog became a thing of the past. And
just as the London fog can become a thing of the past, so can the
problems of global warming.

Boyd: So, we should strive not for sustainability of our current
existence, but for innovations to match our needs as they change?

Deutsch: Yes. The idea of "sustainability", I think, is a terrible
mistake. It is a hyper-optimistic view, ironically, of what humans are
and of what humans can do. It is the idea that we can find a way of
life which will not be dangerous and will not be threatening and will
not require any further creativity or progress. I take the opposite
view to that: I think that problems are inevitable, and that any kind
of stasis is bound to end in catastrophe, so the only thing that's
sustainable is actual progress. And what we need to do, in regard to
global warming, but even more in regard to the things that are coming
up that we don't yet know about, but which might be far more dangerous
for all we know, is to build up the scientific knowledge,
technological knowledge, and wealth to be able to deal with unforeseen
problems when we discover them and, alas, also to recover from
disasters that we fail to foresee.

Boyd: And, I guess, as challenging as it is to create new solutions
and innovations technologically, that's still easier than changing the
basic nature of human beings and what they want and how they act.

Deutsch: Well, it's more than that. If we somehow could succeed in
changing the nature of human beings so that they were not capable of
creating new knowledge, then the same thing would happen to our
species as happened to 99.9% of all species that have ever existed:
namely, we would go extinct. In fact, we would go extinct much faster
because our ecological niche depends on creating new knowledge. All
our sister species, our cousin species, whatever you want to call
them, went extinct. And they went extinct not because they created too
much knowledge and fell afoul of the unintended consequences of their
knowledge, but precisely because they lived a sustainable lifestyle to
which evolution had adapted them. And evolution played the same nasty
trick on them as it usually plays on species: it wiped them out for
doing so.

Boyd: Is it reasonable to imagine we could someday make ourselves
immortal?

Deutsch: Oh yes. It's obvious that the things that make humans die --
I'm talking about natural causes as opposed to accidents and wars and
so on -- are all just technological matters and we have already solved
them. We've increased human lifespan from its natural level of 20-
something up to 80-something or whatever it is now, and we know that
death is caused by certain organic processes in the body, which in
principle can be engineered away. So, while things like travelling to
intergalactic space will no doubt not happen for thousands of years,
it would be very surprising if death were not conquered in the next
few centuries.

Boyd: Well, if you think about it, ideas already have the potential to
outlast the brains and bodies that conceived them. Do we need human
bodies to be fully human or would preservation of the contents of our
brains be close enough?

Deutsch: There are several different strands of technology that might
eventually lead to the effective end of individual people's death,
such as uploading minds into computers and so on. I don't know which
of those will come first. They're all of similar levels of
technological difficulty, so the chances are that pretty soon after
one of them is invented, they will all be invented, and we will think
it just as ridiculous not to back up our minds into some back up
medium as we do today not to back up our life's work from a computer.

Boyd: What an interesting series of challenges we would have then,
deciding who deserves to be backed up, because surely there would be a
financial cost to it.

Deutsch: Well, there will no doubt be a transitional period during
which the technology will be too expensive to apply to everybody. That
is already the case. After all, there are medical treatments now that
can save some people's lives, but cannot save the lives of everybody
with that disease. We have institutions in place that can take care of
that situation. But it will only be temporary, because progress always
consists of alternating phases. First, a creative phase which solves
the fundamental problems, and then, what Thomas Edison called the
"perspiration" phase, where we optimize things. And the perspiration
phase can always be automated. Once something is automated, its cost
goes down to zero, because the only thing that ultimately costs
anything is human attention and creativity. So, soon after the
technology is available, it will become cheaper and eventually will
become just as much taken for granted as the supply of fresh drinking
water.

Boyd: Let's talk about the evolution of human knowledge and culture.
Rather than genes, in this case we talk about memes. And you explain
that some survive because they're good and rational, while others
survive specifically because they crowd out people's appetite for
seeking new ideas and new explanations.

Deutsch: The theory of memes was first thought up by Richard Dawkins
and then elaborated by Susan Blackmore and many others. And I think
it's fundamentally true that all the existing treatments of memes
missed the most important thing about them, which is this distinction
that you just mentioned between what I call rational and anti-rational
memes. The rational memes you characterized just about correctly. They
are the memes that are transmitted from person to person because the
recipient finds that having that knowledge or that behavior benefits
them. But then the anti-rational memes, it's not that they remove
interest, it's that they disable people from criticizing them. So
there are ideas that disable criticism of themselves. And of course
Richard Dawkins' favorite examples of this are certain religions. I
don't think it's true of all religions, but still, it's the archetypal
example that he cites. If you start believing that there's a god who
will punish you if you stop believing in him, then thoughts about that
get suppressed in your mind, and therefore that meme gets hard to
abandon. But I think that this kind of meme, which has an overt
content of saying, "Don't stop believing in me," is actually a rare
kind, and the more insidious kinds are the ones that we don't really
know why we're doing them, such as, well, you mentioned immortality a
while ago. I think that there is an irrational meme that makes people
suspicious of the idea of immortality. They don't mind lengthening
lifespan, but once you talk about lengthening lifespan without a
limit, they start imagining purely imaginary objections. And I don't
think that is rational.

Boyd: Yeah, it is funny that we have many religious traditions that
look forward to an afterlife, that it's something completely separate
and apart from what we have here. But if you look even at literature,
in the stories of human beings who somehow become immortal, they're
always miserable and desperate to end this thing.

Deutsch: Yes, this is an example of the irrationality I was thinking
of. And it is very ironic that religions take this view that having
real immortality would somehow cheat people of the imaginary
immortality that religions offer. By the way, it's also interesting
that the first mathematical theories of infinity were bitterly opposed
by the Church and religious people on the grounds that it was
inherently wrong for humans to try to usurp the functionality of God
in trying to understand the infinite.

Boyd: Let's speak with Ken on the phone in Fort Worth. Hi Ken.

Ken: Hello. Thank you for taking my call, ma'am. I love the show, and
I appreciate what the gentleman has been saying. My question is, if we
allow companies to use all the finite resources on the earth and not
go on in a sustainable way, how can we rely on technology to sustain
us?

Deutsch: The idea that the resources of the earth available to humans
are finite is a mistake. First of all, it's only knowledge that
converts something into a resource in the first place. Nobody knew
that pitch-blend uranium ore was a resource until Henri Becquerel
discovered radioactivity. Soon we will be mining the asteroids for
minerals that are extremely rare on earth. The universe is to all
intents and purposes unlimited and it is our home. To regard just the
resources that you know about today as being "the resources" will
always lead you into the error of thinking that, "they are finite, and
then, once we have used them up, what will we do then?" Unfortunately,
we have no choice, because even if we remained at the present level of
technology and sustained it forever, all that would do is postpone our
extinction. If we want to avoid our extinction, there is nothing
sustainable except the growth of knowledge.

Boyd: You're not arguing of course that we should want to only go out
and waste physical resources. That's not the point that you're making.

Deutsch: No, that's not the point. The question is whether there is an
inherent limit on our progress or not.

Boyd: You disagree with the notion made popular by Stephen Hawking and
others that free will is in fact a sort of illusion. Can you talk
about that?

Deutsch: This is the idea that because we are made of atoms and atoms
are subject to laws of motion that don't allow any wiggle room,
therefore everything we do also doesn't allow any wiggle room, and
therefore our free will must be an illusion. Now, I think that's
called reductionism, and it is simply a mistake. It's sort of assuming
that the laws of physics are a kind of a person, a kind of a
supernatural being that makes us do things. But it's not true. The
laws of physics are simply a description of what we do. So it's not
the laws of physics that make atoms move around. The laws of physics
are simply a description of what they do. And the thing that we see
about the world is that there are levels of description. There are
descriptions at the atomic level and descriptions at the molecular
level and the biological level. And then there are descriptions and
explanations at the level of human thought. And there's no reason to
expect that just because there's a low-level description, there isn't
also a high-level explanation and description. In the book I give some
arguments both due to me and due to people like Douglas Hofstadter
that the high-level description is sometimes the only reasonable
explanation of what is happening. For example, if you play a game of
chess against a computer, then it's not the silicon that has beaten
you. It's the program in the computer, and that program is an
abstraction. The program doesn't consist of atoms. The program is an
abstraction over the atoms, just like human thought is an abstraction
over our atoms, and it is the program that has beaten you. When I make
a decision, it's I who have made it, not my atoms, and not the laws of
physics.

Boyd: So we get really unnecessarily and detrimentally hung up on this
sense that we can get to the absolute foundation of anything.

Deutsch: That's true as well. The idea that there's an absolute
foundation is a formula for stagnation in science and for tyranny in
politics and so on. There will never be an absolute foundation for
knowledge, because there will always be the question, once we have got
a particular fundamental theory, of why it is that way and not some
other way.

Boyd: We have an email here from Paul in Farmer's Branch who says, "It
seems to me we will have many opportunities to go extinct regardless
of how creative we are. Nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions,
solar mass ejection, uncontrollable disease... We may simply not have
enough time to prepare to survive."

Deutsch: I agree with everything in that except for the "regardless".
In all those cases, there is a way that we could make the wrong
decisions and be wiped out as a result, including refusing to make
decisions or shutting our eyes to problems, but there is also a thing
we could do to prevent that. And in all those cases, sufficient
knowledge would solve that problem.

Boyd: So if we were at a place where we could handle it, then we could
handle it.

Deutsch: Yes. And of course there is the possibility that it would
happen before we had that knowledge. For example, an asteroid strike
by something going too fast and too big for us to stop it right now.
The lesson of that is that not only do we need to make progress, we
need to make *rapid* progress, or we will be wiped out.

Boyd: Will knowledge continue to grow even if our brains and bodies
don't evolve in quite the same way they did when we were simply trying
to survive?

Deutsch: Yes. We have become universal computers, universal
explanation machines. And that means that the limits of our ability
are fixed only by the laws of physics, and not by our own
constitution. For example, humans without technology couldn't possibly
live in Oxford, where I live, because the winters in Oxford would kill
any human that wasn't protected by technology such as clothes and
weapons to hunt with. Even in the Great Rift Valley in Africa where
our species evolved, by the time we had evolved, we were already
absolutely dependent on technology to survive. Technology like fire
and clothing. So we're not dependent on our physical constitution,
because we can always adapt nature by using knowledge to compensate
for any physical defects that we may have, or, as we like to think of
it, any physical defects that our environment may have.

Boyd: Let's go back to the phones now. Our next caller is Adam in
Dallas. Hello, Adam.

Adam: If doctors really are able to offer immortality via science,
will that come with infinite use, so that we'll never age? Or will it
just be a constant state of near-death, kind of like living on a life
support machine?

Deutsch: It will be the former. The same argument that tells us that
death is merely a technological problem tells us that youth is also
merely a technological problem. The task of transforming an older body
into a younger body is ultimately just a task of engineering the cells
to be in a slightly different way, and that requires only knowledge.

Boyd: It would be impossible to argue that faith in an ultimate
solution, say, a cure for cancer, has not driven a great deal of
progress and spurred the acquisition of a great deal of knowledge over
time. You say, though, that absolute faith in an ultimate solution can
actually hinder progress after a certain point. Will you explain that?

Deutsch: Yes, certainly. This is, in philosophy, the debate about two
different meanings of the phrase that "humans are perfectible". In one
meaning of that, it means that there is a perfect state that we can
reach if we only do the right thing, like chant the right syllables or
whatever, or a utopia, a perfect society that we can reach if only we
kill the right people and so on. And that notion of perfectibility
leads to stagnation and tyranny. But the other notion of
perfectibility, which is that improvement is always possible, which in
some ways is equally optimistic but in other ways is much more
rational, is also true. And that's the sense of perfectibility that I
argue for, that problems are always soluble. Problems are also
inevitable, and that's why we have no choice but to embark on an open-
ended pursuit of knowledge and good explanations.

Boyd: There's always room for improvement.

Deutsch: Yes.

Boyd: It's interesting. Just this morning on the radio there was a
story about how the philosophy of thinking that people are either
auditory or visual learners has been disproven, at least in one large
study. And it's funny because, for a long time, we based our education
systems around this idea that we understood how people learn one way
or another and we could cater to that. Had we not continued to
question that, we wouldn't have gotten to the place where maybe we can
teach even better.

Deutsch: Yes. I hadn't heard of that study but it sounds extremely
plausible to me, and I would have expected that to be so. I would even
go further and say that even if it had been true that some people are
auditory and some people are visual, this is itself merely a problem
that people could overcome if they wanted to. An auditory person could
become visual if they were interested in doing so. The reason I think
that would have been true is that we are general-purpose knowledge
creating machines.

Boyd: Let's go back to the phones now. We have Sal on the line in
Richardson.

Sal: Your advocacy of Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum
mechanics seems to be not amenable to the kind of scientific inquiry
dynamics that you talk about in your book, that is, conjecture,
criticism, and testability. Would you care to comment on that? It's so
dogmatic that it's almost bearing on a religious kind of belief.

Deutsch: Yes. It's a line of criticism that is often heard. The idea
that, "Quantum mechanics forces upon us the theory of parallel
universes as a sort of religious belief, because all that quantum
mechanics can actually tell us is the outcomes of experiments. It
can't actually prove that the mechanism by which these outcomes are
brought about is as the theory says. So maybe it isn't and maybe there
aren't these parallel universes." The trouble is that that is exactly
the line which would let you say that the observations of the planets
don't necessarily tell us that the sun is at the center of the solar
system. It could still be the Earth, and all that happens is the light
reaching the Earth is as if there were planets out there orbiting the
Sun. This is exactly the argument that the results of quantum
mechanics are just as if there were parallel universes producing them.
Or to give a rather notorious topical example, it's like the people
who say, “Fossils were put there exactly as if there had been
dinosaurs that gave rise to them. But nobody has ever seen a dinosaur,
nor will anybody ever see the dinosaurs that produced the fossil, and
therefore it's a matter of religion to believe in them.” But that is
to misconstrue what science is about. Science is not about just
predicting the outcomes of experiments. It is about understanding the
world.

Boyd: What's the value of the mistakes we have made and continue to
make over time in our pursuit of science?

Deutsch: The pursuit of science is, as my old boss John Wheeler used
to say, who was in Austin, Texas at the time when I worked with him,
our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. And in
the book, I say that it might help people to understand better the
nature of the scientific process if we called scientific theories
"misconceptions" right from the outset, rather than only after we have
discovered what's wrong with them. If we are going to expect continual
improvement, we must expect that all our existing theories -- although
they contain a lot of truth -- contain misconceptions, and therefore,
in the final analysis, are misconceptions. We could talk about
Einstein’s misconception of gravity being a better misconception than
Newton's misconception of gravity. Error is the natural and ubiquitous
state of human minds. The only difference is whether we improve upon
our errors or don't, or refuse to. And if we want to improve upon
them, we have to do these specific things involving criticism, seeking
better explanations, seeking the truth, openness, tolerance, and so
on.

Boyd: Your way of thinking really appeals to me, because there are
people who would find our consistent and predictable fallibility as
time goes by really depressing, but it's a source of delight for you.

Deutsch: It is. It is the means of progress. You talked about
education just now; another thing that has held back education is the
idea that education is about finding ways of not making errors. But in
fact, progress only ever comes through making errors. Errors ought to
be encouraged! As I said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as
possible.

Boyd: Let's go next on the phone to Colleen in Dallas. Hello, Colleen.

Colleen: I've heard an argument, I think due to Descartes, that if you
can imagine an infinite being, then that is a proof of the existence
of God. But from what I understand, the idea of infinity is more of a
scientific idea, and that idea itself merely refers to a physical
reality. To apply that to something completely non-physical is kind of
a fallacy. So I was just wondering what your take on that was.

Deutsch: I almost agree. Certainly that purported proof, called the
ontological argument for the existence of God, is a fallacy. We can't
blame the early philosophers for making that statement, because
infinity wasn't properly understood until about the 19th century. But
infinity is meaningful not only in physics -- for example, that
there's an infinite number of points in a one-inch distance; we now
know how to make sense of statements like that -- it's also meaningful
in mathematics, and it has been found that we can reason validly about
infinity and deeply understand infinity in mathematics too.

Boyd: Is it possible that some other civilization somewhere in the
universe could arrive and explain all this to us, or will it only have
meaning if we as human beings find the answers we seek on our own?

Deutsch: Here's another education theory point. Whenever you
understand something, it is you who have created the idea in your
mind. It may feel as though somebody has poured it into you, like wine
into a glass, but that is an illusion. All knowledge arises by
conjecture and criticism. And when we listen to somebody speaking, we
don't download their theory into our brain. If we did, we wouldn't
understand it; it would be like learning it in a foreign language.
What we do is conjecture what it means, and then use what that person
is saying as a means of criticizing and improving our conjecture, and,
with luck, we then find a way of understanding what that person is
saying, and with even more luck, we find a way of improving on it.

Boyd: You have a fascinating chapter in the book, which might surprise
people, devoted to the question of why flowers are beautiful. And you
demonstrate that at least some things of beauty are in fact
objectively beautiful, or appear to be. Why do flowers fit that
description?

Deutsch: The conventional view of beauty is that it has no objective
basis, that it is purely subjective or else purely cultural. So when
we say, "it's a matter of taste," that's a way in everyday language of
saying there isn't any objective truth in it. But the thing about
flowers is that the evolution of flowers had to make a signal of
attractiveness that would be difficult to forge, but also easy to
recognize by someone else -- in this case, insects -- who knew the
code. And so the insect/flower co-evolution produced a standard, which
was an artistic standard, for what flowers should look like. Now,
here's my argument for why it hit on an objective standard. Tthere are
plenty of examples of signaling in nature, but most of them don't look
beautiful to humans. So the question is, why do flowers, which evolved
to look attractive to insects, also look attractive to humans? And I
make the argument in detail in the book that the only explanation for
this is that the most efficient way of solving this problem of inter-
species signaling was for both the insects and the flowers to evolve
towards a criterion of objective beauty, which then appealed to humans
as well, because humans are capable of understanding objective things.

Boyd: What is the best way to guard against our tendency to lose sight
of our own fallibility?

Deutsch: I think we have to look at whether the things we are saying
and doing meet the problem that they are purported to meet. So, if you
ask, "Why am I in this job?", and if the best explanation that you can
come up with is one that you would think was silly if someone else
said about their job, then that's prima facie evidence that you're in
an irrational pattern of thinking. By the way, like anything else,
this is not conclusive evidence, because it may be that you are in
fact in the right job, but don't actually know the reason. But in that
case, it would do you good to know the reason.

Boyd: Do you find it challenging to have these conversations with
people like me, or people in a general audience, or do you find that
discussing these ideas with regular people who haven't studied them in
depth actually helps to clarify your own thinking?

Deutsch: Definitely the latter. If anything, professionals are more
likely to be stuck in their ways than people who, if I can put it this
way, have real lives, and whose philosophical problems grow out of
real life problems. There's also the fact that, as you will have
noticed, I really like pontificating.

Boyd: Which makes you an excellent radio guest.

Deutsch: Well, thank you.

Boyd: David Deutsch is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of
Physics at Oxford University. His new book is called, "The Beginning
of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World". David, it's been
quite a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us.

David: Thank you for having me on the program.

Boyd: My name is Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

[steve whitt]

On Jan 6, 3:11 am, Josh Jordan <therealjoshjor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Deutsch: Here's another education theory point. Whenever you
> understand something, it is you who have created the idea in your
> mind. It may feel as though somebody has poured it into you, like wine
> into a glass, but that is an illusion. All knowledge arises by
> conjecture and criticism. And when we listen to somebody speaking, we
> don't download their theory into our brain. If we did, we wouldn't
> understand it; it would be like learning it in a foreign language.
> What we do is conjecture what it means, and then use what that person
> is saying as a means of criticizing and improving our conjecture, and,
> with luck, we then find a way of understanding what that person is
> saying, and with even more luck, we find a way of improving on it.

There are so many great things in this interview. I chose the above
quote because it relates so much to what I think is the next step in
this process. For those of us who have been affected by BoI, I think
Deutsch here is giving us sound advice about how to spread the
rational memes found there. I often find myself surrounded by people
committed to certain bad explanations (sustainability and particular
ideas about learning come to mind). I need to remember that I can't
simply replace those bad explanations with the good explanations
suggested by BoI. Instead, I need to be more clever. I need to find
ways to encourage others to construct their own explanations. That's a
lot harder.

[Rami Rustom]

How is it harder?

I can think of one way. I was afraid to conjecture on this site. Until
Elliot helped me learn that it was irrational. I was afraid to upset
thinking that they might think I'm guessing willy-nilly without
reading the book first. I was thinking about respecting David and
Elliot. And I thought that if I was to conjecture without first
reading, that I would be disrespecting them.

So make it short: Fear of rejection. Very irrational meme that I
probably learned from school.

What are some other ways?

--Rami

[steve whitt]

On Jan 7, 12:37 pm, Rami Rustom <ramir...@gmail.com> wrote:

> How is it harder?
>
> I can think of one way. I was afraid to conjecture on this site. Until
> Elliot helped me learn that it was irrational. I was afraid to upset
> thinking that they might think I'm guessing willy-nilly without
> reading the book first. I was thinking about respecting David and
> Elliot. And I thought that if I was to conjecture without first
> reading, that I would be disrespecting them.
>
> So make it short: Fear of rejection. Very irrational meme that I
> probably learned from school.
>
> What are some other ways?
>
> --Rami

How is it harder? With the realization that knowledge is constructed
in a pre-existing mental environment, every person I encounter will
require a different approach. BoI probably affected me so deeply only
because I happened to be in the right place personally to be changed
by its message. Others might never get there, or might only get there
via a very different path. People are different, and I have to
remember that.

I think you point out one gigantic barrier, though there are certainly
many others. I was recently working with high school science teachers.
They are to a person so afraid of being "found out" as scientifically
illiterate that they simply refuse to take any intellectual risks.
Deutsch mentions this in the interview, where he says, "education is

about finding ways of not making errors. But in fact, progress only
ever comes through making errors. Errors ought to be encouraged! As I
said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as possible."

This is such a huge culture shift for educators. They feel that they
are supposed to know "the right answer." The entire field is obsessed
with the idea of avoiding misconceptions. I've said (even before
reading BoI, but I feel this even more so now) that we build our
concepts via misconceptions. Misconceptions are models of the world.
But to a traditionally-trained educator, misconceptions are the
cockroaches of education, to be stamped out instead of built upon.

[Tom Harrigan]

On 7 January 2012 19:53, steve whitt <smw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Jan 7, 12:37 pm, Rami Rustom <ramir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> How is it harder?
>>
>> I can think of one way. I was afraid to conjecture on this site. Until
>> Elliot helped me learn that it was irrational. I was afraid to upset
>> thinking that they might think I'm guessing willy-nilly without
>> reading the book first. I was thinking about respecting David and
>> Elliot. And I thought that if I was to conjecture without first
>> reading, that I would be disrespecting them.
>>
>> So make it short: Fear of rejection. Very irrational meme that I
>> probably learned from school.
>>
>> What are some other ways?
>>
>> --Rami
>
> How is it harder? With the realization that knowledge is constructed
> in a pre-existing mental environment, every person I encounter will
> require a different approach. BoI probably affected me so deeply only
> because I happened to be in the right place personally to be changed
> by its message. Others might never get there, or might only get there
> via a very different path. People are different, and I have to
> remember that.
>

I think you will find that everyone who has ever tried to explain
anything to anyone knows that each person constructs their knowledge
in their own intellectual framework. As pupils become more advanced,
than they take on more responsibility for their own learning. Prof.
Deutsch wrote one (well 2 if you include FOR) book for all of us! If
everyone required their own "approach" then progress is over!

> I think you point out one gigantic barrier, though there are certainly
> many others. I was recently working with high school science teachers.
> They are to a person so afraid of being "found out" as scientifically
> illiterate that they simply refuse to take any intellectual risks.
> Deutsch mentions this in the interview, where he says, "education is
> about finding ways of not making errors. But in fact, progress only
> ever comes through making errors. Errors ought to be encouraged! As I
> said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as possible."
>

You make it seem like we should aim for error! Best of luck getting
anywhere with that meme. Cultural and personal progress are different
things. Next time I get on a plane, I won't be hoping some
aeronautical engineer has made a mistake. I'll be hoping that all the
engineers have banished error in the particular theory that is keeping
me in the air!

> This is such a huge culture shift for educators. They feel that they
> are supposed to know "the right answer." The entire field is obsessed
> with the idea of avoiding misconceptions. I've said (even before
> reading BoI, but I feel this even more so now) that we build our
> concepts via misconceptions. Misconceptions are models of the world.
> But to a traditionally-trained educator, misconceptions are the
> cockroaches of education, to be stamped out instead of built upon.
>

I would definitely prefer to go to a school where the educators "know
the right answer", and where misconceptions are avoided.

[steve whitt]

On Jan 7, 3:48 pm, Tom Harrigan <tom.harri...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I think you will find that everyone who has ever tried to explain
> anything to anyone knows that each person constructs their knowledge
> in their own intellectual framework.

Yes, this has been my experience.

>
> You make it seem like we should aim for error!

No, we should aim for good explanations. But our explanations
(including our explanations about how airplanes work) will always be
imperfect.

> I would definitely prefer to go to a school where the educators "know
> the right answer", and where misconceptions are avoided.

Sadly, though the educators I work with do their best to hide it, many
(even the science teachers) are scientifically illiterate. But even if
they weren't, the learners would still build their knowledge through
misconceptions.

[Rami Rustom]

On Jan 7, 2012 2:12 PM, "steve whitt" <smw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jan 7, 12:37 pm, Rami Rustom <ramir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > How is it harder?
> >
> > I can think of one way. I was afraid to conjecture on this site. Until
> > Elliot helped me learn that it was irrational. I was afraid to upset
> > thinking that they might think I'm guessing willy-nilly without
> > reading the book first. I was thinking about respecting David and
> > Elliot. And I thought that if I was to conjecture without first
> > reading, that I would be disrespecting them.
> >
> > So make it short: Fear of rejection. Very irrational meme that I
> > probably learned from school.
> >
> > What are some other ways?
> >
> > --Rami
>
> How is it harder? With the realization that knowledge is constructed
> in a pre-existing mental environment, every person I encounter will
> require a different approach.

My theory explains why each person needs a different approach and why
each person requires a different approach. Its because no two mind's
knowledge networks are the same. No one can *tell* me which of my
points, vectors, or superstructures are wrong so that I could correct
them. Why? Because no one knows where my points are, the place,
direction or length of my vectors, nor the structure of my
superstructures. Even I don't know these things because most of it is
implicit.

> BoI probably affected me so deeply only
> because I happened to be in the right place personally to be changed
> by its message.

I'd like to define this *right place personally to be changed*.

Some definitions:
Will (W), Knowledge (K), Behavior (B), 1-way causal relationship (->),
2-way causal relationship (<->).

K <-> W -> B

So you learned (K) that BoI is important, i.e. you were in the right
place personally to be changed.
* K

So you knew you should read BoI
* K -> W

So you read BoI
* W -> B

Then you learned many things.
* K

Because of this new knowledge, now you know that you need to do other
new things...
* K -> W

One new thing you learned from BoI, is that you should learn more things.
* W -> B

And the cycle repeats.

> Others might never get there, or might only get there
> via a very different path. People are different, and I have to
> remember that.
>
> I think you point out one gigantic barrier, though there are certainly
> many others. I was recently working with high school science teachers.
> They are to a person so afraid of being "found out" as scientifically
> illiterate that they simply refuse to take any intellectual risks.
> Deutsch mentions this in the interview, where he says, "education is
> about finding ways of not making errors. But in fact, progress only
> ever comes through making errors. Errors ought to be encouraged! As I
> said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as possible."

Errors are learning tools, not sources of distress, i.e. psychological hurt.

--Rami

[Elliot Temple]

On Jan 7, 2012, at 11:53 AM, steve whitt wrote:

>
>
> On Jan 7, 12:37 pm, Rami Rustom <ramir...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> How is it harder?
>>
>> I can think of one way. I was afraid to conjecture on this site. Until
>> Elliot helped me learn that it was irrational. I was afraid to upset
>> thinking that they might think I'm guessing willy-nilly without
>> reading the book first. I was thinking about respecting David and
>> Elliot. And I thought that if I was to conjecture without first
>> reading, that I would be disrespecting them.
>>
>> So make it short: Fear of rejection. Very irrational meme that I
>> probably learned from school.
>>
>> What are some other ways?
>>
>> --Rami
>
> How is it harder? With the realization that knowledge is constructed
> in a pre-existing mental environment, every person I encounter will
> require a different approach. BoI probably affected me so deeply only
> because I happened to be in the right place personally to be changed
> by its message. Others might never get there, or might only get there
> via a very different path. People are different, and I have to
> remember that.
>
> I think you point out one gigantic barrier, though there are certainly
> many others. I was recently working with high school science teachers.
> They are to a person so afraid of being "found out" as scientifically
> illiterate that they simply refuse to take any intellectual risks.

Some are found out anyway.

Once upon a time when I was in school, I had the following debate with my science teacher:

Does paper have height and therefore volume?

The teacher said that paper is so thin that it has no height (literally zero), and so even if you stack lots of paper it still has no height.

I think he claimed it seems to have height in practice only because of air between the pages.

I disagreed.

What happens to children subjected to such idiocy, but less confident about standing up to it and disputing the teacher's authority?

-- Elliot Temple
http://curi.us/

[Rami Rustom]

I never stood up when I saw errors from teachers [although I never
noticed a huge error like that one]. I was brought up in a home where
we were taught to respect parents and teachers [authority]. I guess I
got accustomed to not speaking out, i.e. it became a habit of mine not
speak out.

-- Rami

[Elliot Temple]

On Jan 6, 2012, at 12:11 AM, Josh Jordan <therealj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on
> KERA's "Think" with Krys Boyd on August 29, 2011. The audio is
> available at http://www.kera.org/2011/08/29/explanations-that-transform-the-world/
>
> Krys Boyd: You're listening to Think on KERA 90.1. I'm Krys Boyd. Does
> understanding the universe give us the power to control the universe?

yes. what's the argument that it wouldn't?

> Humans have sought to explain the workings of the natural world for
> millennia and have used the methods of modern science with ever
> greater effectiveness since the Enlightenment. We've learned to do
> things that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined, from global
> telecommunications to life-saving medical treatments to tracing the
> history of the universe to within seconds of the Big Bang. And my
> guest today will argue that while there was a beginning to humankind's
> scientific achievement, there is no reason to believe our achievements
> will someday reach an end point. Given what we know about ourselves,
> he is hopeful that our acquisition and application of scientific
> knowledge could last as long as the universe itself.

no, all knowledge.

> David Deutsch is
> a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Physics at Oxford
> University.

appeal to authority

> His new book is called "The Beginning of Infinity:
> Explanations that Transform the World". David, welcome to Think.
>
> David Deutsch: Hi, Krys. Thanks for inviting me.
>
> Boyd: You write that, "All progress comes from the human quest for
> good explanations." How has our definition of a "good explanation"
> evolved over the centuries?

A better statement is: "All progress comes from seeking knowledge."

> Deutsch: One of the most noticeable changes that happened in the
> history of our species was the scientific revolution, which made the
> difference between making progress that was either absent or so slow
> that no human ever noticed it in their lifetime, and what's happened
> since then, which is that we've got used to change happening all the
> time and being part of our lives.

this is misleading b/c it makes it sound like Athens never existed.

> And because that change was so
> noticeable, people wondered what caused it. Initially, they got all
> sorts of wrong theories about what it was that made science
> successful, and some truths as well. For example, it was realized
> almost immediately that rejecting authority was a necessary condition
> for making progress.

not exactly, we still have authority things like "Fellow of the Royal Society" and the royal society is old.

> That is, authority in regard to knowledge, though
> this spread to political authority as well. But then, in the positive
> sense, what actually caused science, people got really confused and
> thought that we kind of absorbed knowledge of nature by being open to
> experience, and that experience somehow implanted true ideas about the
> world in our minds. Now, this is completely untrue, and one of the
> things I do in the book is trace how wrong that is and also how the
> real explanation, which is that we seek hard-to-vary explanations,

i criticized this before this interview (also before publication of BoI) and DD did not refute my criticism but kept on saying refuted stuff.

> applies not only in science, but in all sorts of other fields,
> including art, morality, political philosophy, and so on.
>
> Boyd: It's so interesting, David, to reflect on the idea that the
> before the Enlightenment, many people, learned people, assumed that
> everything worth knowing had already been revealed. Today, that lack
> of curiosity strikes us as almost dangerous.

only "almost"?

> Deutsch: Yes. It's basically very implausible today, because we're all
> hoping and expecting that improvements will be made. The whole of
> politics is about who has the best idea for improvements and so on.

false. that is not the "whole" of politics.

> It's difficult to imagine, but if you try to imagine what it was like
> during most of human history when nobody ever experienced an
> improvement in anything, then, in regard to knowledge, it was sort of
> common sense that there was this thing called knowledge. We knew that
> the sun would rise every day, but there was nothing new to discover,
> because all that was going to happen tomorrow was that the sun would
> rise again just like it did today.
>
> Boyd: What's the relationship between curiosity and intelligence?
>
> Deutsch: Curiosity, I think, is a way of referring to the desire for
> good explanations. It's a way of thinking that there's something here
> that we don't know, or some problem, some puzzle, for which we would
> like to have the explanation, that is, a statement about reality which
> explains why the thing we are curious about is as it is.
> Intelligence... Well, I shy away from that word, because it is laden

why not shy away from "laden" too? it's too fancy, rather than maximally clear.

> with this wrong idea of where knowledge comes from. The idea of
> intelligence is that there is some ability that allows us to get good
> knowledge. But in fact, knowledge comes from criticism, it comes from
> conjecture about what might be better than the ideas we have. And
> conjecture is fallible. So, curiosity is great. Intelligence, I think,
> is a misleading term, and I'd rather refer to things like criticism
> and creativity.
>
> Boyd: I find it fascinating that many of the scientists we speak to on
> this program have a similar philosophy about intelligence. They're the
> last people to say that being a physicist is tantamount to being a
> genius. And there are a lot of people in other fields who don't have
> any problem at all feeling as if they are very intelligent.
>
> Deutsch: I do think that it's a disservice to humankind to promote the
> view that success in anything intellectual is due to something innate.
> It's not due to an innate ability, because there is no such ability
> possible. It is only due to a critical attitude, an open attitude, a
> desire for truth, that sort of thing. And abilities are knowledge
> themselves. They are things that we learn in the course of trying to
> discover the truth.

David has implicitly accepted that lots of other people on the program had a similar philosophy about intelligence as he does. But that is false, so he should have contradicted it and explained the difference, rather than going along with the view that the people on this program are special and wonderful and its the Other People who are dumb and wrong.

> Boyd: Can we trust ourselves to use our newly gained abilities for
> good rather than evil?

lol

> Deutsch: This is part of the question of whether the spectacular
> growth of knowledge that has happened in science can happen in other
> fields as well, and the one you are asking about is morality. I think
> that the answer must be, "Yes, there is such a thing as an objective
> difference between right and wrong."

The answer can't be "yes" until the "trust" part of the question is changed to something better. David is implicitly endorsing trust here!!

> And although it's easy to be
> cynical and look around at all the evils there are in the world and
> also at all the disagreements about right and wrong that there are in
> the world, I think if you look more deeply and over a longer time
> scale, you can easily see

the truth is not easy to see anymore than it's obvious. wtf DD, wtf.

> that there is progress and that it's not
> just a matter of cultural prejudice or just a matter of definitions.
> For example, there was a time, only a few hundred years ago, when
> every reasonable person would have thought that slavery is a natural
> state of some people, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with
> it. Whereas now, you'll hardly find any thinking person who doesn't
> agree that it is a great evil, and that steps could and should be made
> to abolish it.
>
> Boyd: Let's talk about some of the ways that we've physically changed
> the world that we live in. For example, a lot of modern cities today
> are shaped as much by human intervention as by geologic forces. Will
> you talk about that a little bit?

only "as much by"? false.

> Deutsch: A city is the obvious example

obvious? but that's obviously a stupid thing to say.

why did David quit philosophy before learning the truth isn't obvious from Popper? seriously wtf?

> of what I think is a general
> truth. Remember, we're only at the beginning of infinity and always
> will be and on Earth, we're only at the beginning of shaping it, but a
> city is an example of the fact once knowledge is involved in physical
> processes, it is the determining factor of the landscape.

here David is contradicting the host in a quiet way. his policy seems to be appeasement, lying, and obscuring disagreement. intentionally.

> That is,
> whereas other species, the ones that are incapable of generating
> knowledge, are shaped by and adapted to their landscape, humans create
> their own landscape and shape it and adapt it. So, for humans, there
> is no such thing as a resource until some human has developed the
> knowledge for making it a resource. I think that if we choose to do
> the right thing and continue to use knowledge and to seek better
> things and progress, then this will extend to anything and everything.
> We'll move off the planet and improve things as we go. But, no doubt
> many people will be thinking as I say this, cities and things haven't
> always improved things; there's pollution and so on. But I think this
> is a myth of a rosy past. It's no good thinking of a rosy past in
> which the rivers were clean the air was pure, if people at that time
> actually were plagued by cholera.
>
> Boyd: I want to talk about something like global warming. You are
> confident that we will be able to survive it given that in the past we
> have used our technologies and our intellects to survive inhospitable
> climates which occurred naturally all over the planet.
>
> Deutsch: Yes. Global warming is one of the first global challenges
> that we face as a result of technology or improving things.

no it's not. another one was machine gun warfare. another was atom bombs. another was culture clash due to global communication, or previously due to improving travel. another is the strain of the open society. another was global cooling – that sounds just as much as global warming.

> We've
> improved a whole lot of things, and as a result, a slow worsening has
> happened in part of our environment.

wtf

> Now, this has happened on a
> smaller scale thousands of times. I'm old enough to remember when many
> of the cities in England had smog, and the London fog was deemed to be
> part of the London scene. It wasn't even thought of as a thing that
> humans could undo. And yet, as technology improved, wealth increased,
> and standards raised, the London fog became a thing of the past. And
> just as the London fog can become a thing of the past, so can the
> problems of global warming.
>
> Boyd: So, we should strive not for sustainability of our current
> existence, but for innovations to match our needs as they change?
>
> Deutsch: Yes. The idea of "sustainability", I think, is a terrible
> mistake.

Inserting "I think" there was a mistake.

it's terrible because it's part of a wider policy of betraying progress, science and reason. because it's appeasing those who attack the power of man's mind to know anything, and who hate confidence and competence. further, DD intentionally and knowingly sheltered his views on the matter from criticism.

> It is a hyper-optimistic view, ironically, of what humans are
> and of what humans can do. It is the idea that we can find a way of
> life which will not be dangerous and will not be threatening and will
> not require any further creativity or progress. I take the opposite
> view to that: I think that problems are inevitable, and that any kind
> of stasis is bound to end in catastrophe, so the only thing that's
> sustainable is actual progress. And what we need to do, in regard to
> global warming, but even more in regard to the things that are coming
> up that we don't yet know about, but which might be far more dangerous
> for all we know, is to build up the scientific knowledge,
> technological knowledge, and wealth to be able to deal with unforeseen
> problems when we discover them and, alas, also to recover from
> disasters that we fail to foresee.

this global warming stuff is way too appeasing of junk science and politicized pressure on "intellectuals" in general. David is under such pressure and has reacted by saying things more acceptable to his bullies, rather than standing up for free thinking.

> Boyd: And, I guess, as challenging as it is to create new solutions
> and innovations technologically, that's still easier than changing the
> basic nature of human beings and what they want and how they act.
>
> Deutsch: Well, it's more than that. If we somehow could succeed in
> changing the nature of human beings so that they were not capable of
> creating new knowledge, then the same thing would happen to our
> species as happened to 99.9% of all species that have ever existed:
> namely, we would go extinct. In fact, we would go extinct much faster
> because our ecological niche depends on creating new knowledge. All
> our sister species, our cousin species, whatever you want to call
> them, went extinct. And they went extinct not because they created too
> much knowledge and fell afoul of the unintended consequences of their
> knowledge, but precisely because they lived a sustainable lifestyle to
> which evolution had adapted them. And evolution played the same nasty
> trick on them as it usually plays on species: it wiped them out for
> doing so.
>
> Boyd: Is it reasonable to imagine we could someday make ourselves
> immortal?
>
> Deutsch: Oh yes. It's obvious

"Obvious" again. wtf

> that the things that make humans die --
> I'm talking about natural causes as opposed to accidents and wars and
> so on -- are all just technological matters and we have already solved
> them. We've increased human lifespan from its natural level of 20-
> something up to 80-something or whatever it is now, and we know that
> death is caused by certain organic processes in the body, which in
> principle can be engineered away. So, while things like travelling to
> intergalactic space will no doubt not happen for thousands of years,

wtf? "no doubt"? for an issue of how long the growth of particular knowledge will take??

> it would be very surprising if death were not conquered in the next
> few centuries.

but this too is an issue of the growth of knowledge. not just medical-scientific knowledge but also philosophical knowledge b/c many ppl strongly oppose such progress.

>
> Boyd: Well, if you think about it, ideas already have the potential to
> outlast the brains and bodies that conceived them. Do we need human
> bodies to be fully human or would preservation of the contents of our
> brains be close enough?
>
> Deutsch: There are several different strands of technology that might
> eventually lead to the effective end of individual people's death,
> such as uploading minds into computers and so on. I don't know which
> of those will come first. They're all of similar levels of
> technological difficulty, so the chances are that pretty soon after
> one of them is invented, they will all be invented, and we will think
> it just as ridiculous not to back up our minds into some back up
> medium as we do today not to back up our life's work from a computer.
>
> Boyd: What an interesting series of challenges we would have then,
> deciding who deserves to be backed up, because surely there would be a
> financial cost to it.
>
> Deutsch: Well, there will no doubt be a transitional period during
> which the technology will be too expensive to apply to everybody. That
> is already the case. After all, there are medical treatments now that
> can save some people's lives, but cannot save the lives of everybody
> with that disease. We have institutions in place that can take care of
> that situation. But it will only be temporary, because progress always
> consists of alternating phases. First, a creative phase which solves
> the fundamental problems, and then, what Thomas Edison called the
> "perspiration" phase, where we optimize things.

What ridiculous *unargued* nonsense about alternating phases. (i checked BoI and it's not argued there)

isn't this an example of historicism? it's saying there is an iron law of history (or historical progression going forward, or whatever) dictating that things always go in phases like this.

> And the perspiration
> phase can always be automated. Once something is automated, its cost
> goes down to zero,

near zero, not to zero.

> because the only thing that ultimately costs
> anything is human attention and creativity.

no. what?

> So, soon after the
> technology is available, it will become cheaper and eventually will
> become just as much taken for granted as the supply of fresh drinking
> water.

fresh drinking water does not, however, cost zero. and never will. even though it's not "human attention and creativity".

>
> Boyd: Let's talk about the evolution of human knowledge and culture.
> Rather than genes, in this case we talk about memes. And you explain
> that some survive because they're good and rational, while others
> survive specifically because they crowd out people's appetite for
> seeking new ideas and new explanations.

that's not very accurate.

>
> Deutsch: The theory of memes was first thought up by Richard Dawkins
> and then elaborated by Susan Blackmore and many others.

what did Susan Blackmore say that constitutes and elaboration of meme theory? quote?

I think she didn't contribute anything and David knows it and he's a lying appeaser on purpose.

he certainly didn't name her for being the most worthy, but rather to appease some bad people familiar with her reputation.

> And I think
> it's fundamentally true that all the existing treatments of memes
> missed the most important thing about them, which is this distinction
> that you just mentioned between what I call rational and anti-rational
> memes. The rational memes you characterized just about correctly. They
> are the memes that are transmitted from person to person because the
> recipient finds that having that knowledge or that behavior benefits
> them. But then the anti-rational memes, it's not that they remove
> interest,

or crowd out appetite

hmm, they are taking callers now. they never did anything like a basic summary of the issues, and what well known ideas held by many listeners BoI contradicts, and why. it's just been a few details without depth or context. it'd be better to give a sample of real philosophy, or an overview, than something that is neither.

> Ken: Hello. Thank you for taking my call, ma'am. I love the show, and
> I appreciate what the gentleman has been saying. My question is, if we
> allow companies to use all the finite resources on the earth and not
> go on in a sustainable way, how can we rely on technology to sustain
> us?

This is the audience David has sacrificed his integrity to better please!

> Deutsch: The idea that the resources of the earth available to humans
> are finite is a mistake. First of all, it's only knowledge that
> converts something into a resource in the first place. Nobody knew
> that pitch-blend uranium ore was a resource until Henri Becquerel
> discovered radioactivity. Soon we will be mining the asteroids for
> minerals that are extremely rare on earth. The universe is to all
> intents and purposes unlimited and it is our home. To regard just the
> resources that you know about today as being "the resources" will
> always lead you into the error of thinking that, "they are finite, and
> then, once we have used them up, what will we do then?" Unfortunately,
> we have no choice, because even if we remained at the present level of
> technology and sustained it forever, all that would do is postpone our
> extinction. If we want to avoid our extinction, there is nothing
> sustainable except the growth of knowledge.

also how do you use up protons and electrons and stuff? they're very very very hard to destroy. these people don't consider the conservation laws in physics. the only real limit, as far as we know, is entropy.

>
> Boyd: You're not arguing of course that we should want to only go out
> and waste physical resources. That's not the point that you're making.

wtf?

>
> Deutsch: No, that's not the point. The question is whether there is an
> inherent limit on our progress or not.

wtf?

how can you give such a bland answer to that question?

who is wasting resources? no one. so wtf is going on? what does the question mean? i know, David knows, but David isn't saying, he's evading: he's sacrificing his mind to better please the vile scum which called in.

David didn't say some important things about this, e.g. that free will is a part of moral philosophy (that makes no claims about physics) and rejecting it would therefore require new arguments in moral philosophy (not physics).

why not? it's not like he had something else very good to say.

>
> Boyd: So we get really unnecessarily and detrimentally hung up on this
> sense that we can get to the absolute foundation of anything.
>
> Deutsch: That's true as well. The idea that there's an absolute
> foundation is a formula for stagnation in science and for tyranny in
> politics and so on. There will never be an absolute foundation for
> knowledge, because there will always be the question, once we have got
> a particular fundamental theory, of why it is that way and not some
> other way.
>
> Boyd: We have an email here from Paul in Farmer's Branch

who cares where he is?

> who says, "It
> seems to me we will have many opportunities to go extinct regardless
> of how creative we are. Nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions,
> solar mass ejection, uncontrollable disease... We may simply not have
> enough time to prepare to survive."
>
> Deutsch: I agree with everything in that except for the "regardless".
> In all those cases, there is a way that we could make the wrong
> decisions and be wiped out as a result, including refusing to make
> decisions or shutting our eyes to problems, but there is also a thing
> we could do to prevent that. And in all those cases, sufficient
> knowledge would solve that problem.
>
> Boyd: So if we were at a place where we could handle it, then we could
> handle it.
>
> Deutsch: Yes. And of course there is the possibility that it would
> happen before we had that knowledge. For example, an asteroid strike
> by something going too fast and too big for us to stop it right now.
> The lesson of that is that not only do we need to make progress, we
> need to make *rapid* progress, or we will be wiped out.
>
> Boyd: Will knowledge continue to grow even if our brains and bodies
> don't evolve in quite the same way they did when we were simply trying
> to survive?

lol wtf

>
> Deutsch: Yes.

dude WTF, the only acceptable answer here is along the lines of, "no you're super confused"

> We have become universal computers, universal
> explanation machines. And that means that the limits of our ability
> are fixed only by the laws of physics, and not by our own
> constitution. For example, humans without technology couldn't possibly
> live in Oxford, where I live, because the winters in Oxford would kill
> any human that wasn't protected by technology such as clothes and
> weapons to hunt with. Even in the Great Rift Valley in Africa where
> our species evolved, by the time we had evolved, we were already
> absolutely dependent on technology to survive. Technology like fire
> and clothing. So we're not dependent on our physical constitution,
> because we can always adapt nature by using knowledge to compensate
> for any physical defects that we may have, or, as we like to think of
> it, any physical defects that our environment may have.

so indirect. David is sacrificing the hell out of clarity. what do you think he's sacrificing clarity for?

>
> Boyd: Let's go back to the phones now. Our next caller is Adam in
> Dallas. Hello, Adam.
>
> Adam: If doctors really are able to offer immortality via science,
> will that come with infinite use, so that we'll never age? Or will it
> just be a constant state of near-death, kind of like living on a life
> support machine?

this question is boring but at least it made sense.

> Deutsch: It will be the former. The same argument that tells us that
> death is merely a technological problem tells us that youth is also
> merely a technological problem. The task of transforming an older body
> into a younger body is ultimately just a task of engineering the cells
> to be in a slightly different way, and that requires only knowledge.
>
> Boyd: It would be impossible to argue that faith in an ultimate
> solution, say, a cure for cancer, has not driven a great deal of
> progress and spurred the acquisition of a great deal of knowledge over
> time. You say, though, that absolute faith in an ultimate solution can
> actually hinder progress after a certain point. Will you explain that?

wtf

>
> Deutsch: Yes, certainly. This is, in philosophy, the debate about two
> different meanings of the phrase that "humans are perfectible".

Blackmore worth naming (Hofstadter too earlier) but Godwin isn't? wtf

> In one
> meaning of that, it means that there is a perfect state that we can
> reach if we only do the right thing, like chant the right syllables or
> whatever, or a utopia, a perfect society that we can reach if only we
> kill the right people and so on. And that notion of perfectibility
> leads to stagnation and tyranny. But the other notion of
> perfectibility, which is that improvement is always possible, which in
> some ways is equally optimistic but in other ways is much more
> rational, is also true. And that's the sense of perfectibility that I
> argue for, that problems are always soluble. Problems are also
> inevitable, and that's why we have no choice but to embark on an open-
> ended pursuit of knowledge and good explanations.
>
> Boyd: There's always room for improvement.
>
> Deutsch: Yes.
>
> Boyd: It's interesting. Just this morning on the radio there was a
> story about how the philosophy of thinking that people are either
> auditory or visual learners has been disproven, at least in one large
> study. And it's funny because, for a long time, we based our education
> systems around this idea that we understood how people learn one way
> or another and we could cater to that. Had we not continued to
> question that, we wouldn't have gotten to the place where maybe we can
> teach even better.

oh god. all that crap people did to children, using the auditory/visual learner excuses, never made any sense. it wasn't right until we knew better. it was always crap.

> Deutsch: Yes. I hadn't heard of that study but it sounds extremely
> plausible to me, and I would have expected that to be so. I would even
> go further and say that even if it had been true that some people are
> auditory and some people are visual, this is itself merely a problem
> that people could overcome if they wanted to. An auditory person could
> become visual if they were interested in doing so. The reason I think
> that would have been true is that we are general-purpose knowledge
> creating machines.
>
> Boyd: Let's go back to the phones now. We have Sal on the line in
> Richardson.

the way this interview is going, nothing ever gets settled.

> Sal: Your advocacy of Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum
> mechanics seems to be not amenable to the kind of scientific inquiry
> dynamics that you talk about in your book, that is, conjecture,
> criticism, and testability. Would you care to comment on that? It's so
> dogmatic that it's almost bearing on a religious kind of belief.

more vile scum calling in. now watch David be friendly to the hostile caller.

do you think David will get any questions of value to him by the end?

> Deutsch: Yes. It's a line of criticism that is often heard. The idea
> that, "Quantum mechanics forces upon us the theory of parallel
> universes as a sort of religious belief, because all that quantum
> mechanics can actually tell us is the outcomes of experiments. It
> can't actually prove that the mechanism by which these outcomes are
> brought about is as the theory says. So maybe it isn't and maybe there
> aren't these parallel universes." The trouble is that that is exactly
> the line which would let you say that the observations of the planets
> don't necessarily tell us that the sun is at the center of the solar
> system. It could still be the Earth, and all that happens is the light
> reaching the Earth is as if there were planets out there orbiting the
> Sun. This is exactly the argument that the results of quantum
> mechanics are just as if there were parallel universes producing them.
> Or to give a rather notorious topical example, it's like the people
> who say, “Fossils were put there exactly as if there had been
> dinosaurs that gave rise to them. But nobody has ever seen a dinosaur,
> nor will anybody ever see the dinosaurs that produced the fossil, and
> therefore it's a matter of religion to believe in them.” But that is
> to misconstrue what science is about. Science is not about just
> predicting the outcomes of experiments. It is about understanding the
> world.

a big part of David's tactic here, which he's used above too, is to get lost in details, so no one understands what's being said, instead of clearly answering the main important aspects of the question.

btw this is one of the ways David seems to be talking past the other people, sometimes, a bit like politicians do.

> Boyd: What's the value of the mistakes we have made and continue to
> make over time in our pursuit of science?
>
> Deutsch: The pursuit of science is, as my old boss John Wheeler used
> to say, who was in Austin, Texas

who cares where?

> at the time when I worked with him,
> our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. And in
> the book, I say that it might help people to understand better the
> nature of the scientific process if we called scientific theories
> "misconceptions" right from the outset, rather than only after we have
> discovered what's wrong with them. If we are going to expect continual
> improvement, we must expect that all our existing theories -- although
> they contain a lot of truth -- contain misconceptions, and therefore,
> in the final analysis, are misconceptions. We could talk about
> Einstein’s misconception of gravity being a better misconception than
> Newton's misconception of gravity. Error is the natural and ubiquitous
> state of human minds. The only difference is whether we improve upon
> our errors or don't, or refuse to. And if we want to improve upon
> them, we have to do these specific things involving criticism, seeking
> better explanations, seeking the truth, openness, tolerance, and so
> on.

"and so on". David never gets a chance on this interview to actually really explain anything. i think one proper explanation, good enough to persuade people, would be better than a dozen half-baked ones.

> Boyd: Your way of thinking really appeals to me, because there are
> people who would find our consistent and predictable fallibility as
> time goes by really depressing, but it's a source of delight for you.

we should decide by what's true, not by emotions! now watch David not say so:

> Deutsch: It is. It is the means of progress. You talked about
> education just now; another thing that has held back education is the
> idea that education is about finding ways of not making errors. But in
> fact, progress only ever comes through making errors. Errors ought to
> be encouraged! As I said, our whole problem is to make them as fast as
> possible.

people hearing this will not be able to persuade their neighbor. in a week they won't be able to persuade themselves. because they haven't understood it. so what's the purpose of it?

> Boyd: Let's go next on the phone to Colleen in Dallas. Hello, Colleen.
>
> Colleen: I've heard an argument, I think due to Descartes, that if you
> can imagine an infinite being, then that is a proof of the existence
> of God.

lol

> But from what I understand, the idea of infinity is more of a
> scientific idea, and that idea itself merely refers to a physical
> reality. To apply that to something completely non-physical is kind of
> a fallacy. So I was just wondering what your take on that was.
>
> Deutsch: I almost agree. Certainly that purported proof, called the
> ontological argument for the existence of God, is a fallacy.

what's the point of giving the name? the caller already said what the idea is. what good is the name? it's for prestige, authority, fanciness, BS.

> We can't blame the early philosophers for making that statement,

yes we can

> because infinity wasn't properly understood until about the 19th century.

properly understanding infinity was not necessary to refute that stupid God argument.

> But
> infinity is meaningful not only in physics -- for example, that
> there's an infinite number of points in a one-inch distance; we now
> know how to make sense of statements like that -- it's also meaningful
> in mathematics, and it has been found that we can reason validly about
> infinity and deeply understand infinity in mathematics too.

infinity is also meaningful in philosophy.

> Boyd: Is it possible that some other civilization somewhere in the
> universe could arrive and explain all this to us, or will it only have
> meaning if we as human beings find the answers we seek on our own?
>
> Deutsch: Here's another education theory point. Whenever you
> understand something, it is you who have created the idea in your
> mind. It may feel as though somebody has poured it into you, like wine
> into a glass, but that is an illusion. All knowledge arises by
> conjecture and criticism. And when we listen to somebody speaking, we
> don't download their theory into our brain. If we did, we wouldn't
> understand it; it would be like learning it in a foreign language.
> What we do is conjecture what it means, and then use what that person
> is saying as a means of criticizing and improving our conjecture, and,
> with luck, we then find a way of understanding what that person is
> saying, and with even more luck, we find a way of improving on it.

this is all conclusions. is the idea for listeners to see whether they like the sound of the conclusions and judge the book that way?

>
> Boyd: You have a fascinating chapter in the book, which might surprise
> people, devoted to the question of why flowers are beautiful. And you
> demonstrate that at least some things of beauty are in fact
> objectively beautiful, or appear to be. Why do flowers fit that
> description?

yet again there's a lack of followup or depth.

> Deutsch: The conventional view of beauty is that it has no objective
> basis,

David has now set it up for many listeners to come away with the (false) idea that he believes there is an "objective basis" for beauty.

> that it is purely subjective or else purely cultural. So when
> we say, "it's a matter of taste," that's a way in everyday language of
> saying there isn't any objective truth in it. But the thing about
> flowers is that the evolution of flowers had to make a signal of
> attractiveness that would be difficult to forge, but also easy to
> recognize by someone else -- in this case, insects -- who knew the
> code. And so the insect/flower co-evolution produced a standard, which
> was an artistic standard, for what flowers should look like. Now,
> here's my argument for why it hit on an objective standard. Tthere are
> plenty of examples of signaling in nature, but most of them don't look
> beautiful to humans. So the question is, why do flowers, which evolved
> to look attractive to insects, also look attractive to humans?

couldn't which signals look beautiful to humans be arbitrary cultural convention?

> And I
> make the argument in detail in the book that the only explanation for
> this is that the most efficient way of solving this problem of inter-
> species signaling was for both the insects and the flowers to evolve
> towards a criterion of objective beauty, which then appealed to humans
> as well, because humans are capable of understanding objective things.
>
> Boyd: What is the best way to guard against our tendency to lose sight
> of our own fallibility?
>
> Deutsch: I think we have to look at whether the things we are saying
> and doing meet the problem that they are purported to meet. So, if you
> ask, "Why am I in this job?", and if the best explanation that you can
> come up with is one that you would think was silly if someone else
> said about their job, then that's prima facie evidence that you're in
> an irrational pattern of thinking. By the way, like anything else,
> this is not conclusive evidence, because it may be that you are in
> fact in the right job, but don't actually know the reason. But in that
> case, it would do you good to know the reason.

David tries so hard to appease everyone then give these little things that he disapproves of their lives without enough depth for them to understand, and vague enough they might miss it, but it seems counterproductive. who will benefit from these inadequately explained little hints David thinks very badly of their lives?

> Boyd: Do you find it challenging to have these conversations with
> people like me, or people in a general audience, or do you find that
> discussing these ideas with regular people who haven't studied them in
> depth actually helps to clarify your own thinking?
>
> Deutsch: Definitely the latter.

I think that's true but David doesn't act accordingly.

> If anything, professionals are more
> likely to be stuck in their ways than people who, if I can put it this
> way, have real lives, and whose philosophical problems grow out of
> real life problems. There's also the fact that, as you will have
> noticed, I really like pontificating.
>
> Boyd: Which makes you an excellent radio guest.
>
> Deutsch: Well, thank you.
>
> Boyd: David Deutsch is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of
> Physics at Oxford University. His new book is called, "The Beginning
> of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World". David, it's been
> quite a pleasure. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us.
>
> David: Thank you for having me on the program.
>
> Boyd: My name is Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.

this is supposed to promote BoI. but it doesn't really answer pre-sales questions or tell people why to read the book. it only promotes the book very indirectly by kinda saying "if you find this discussion interesting you can find similar stuff in the book". isn't that bad?


-- Elliot Temple
http://fallibleideas.com/

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 2, 2014, at 8:43 PM, Brian Scurfield <brianks...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>
> On 2 Feb 2014, at 08:09, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Jan 6, 2012, at 12:11 AM, Josh Jordan <therealj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Here is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on
>>> KERA's "Think" with Krys Boyd on August 29, 2011. The audio is
>>> available at http://www.kera.org/2011/08/29/explanations-that-transform-the-world/
>>>
>>>

>>> That is, authority in regard to knowledge, though
>>> this spread to political authority as well. But then, in the positive
>>> sense, what actually caused science, people got really confused and
>>> thought that we kind of absorbed knowledge of nature by being open to
>>> experience, and that experience somehow implanted true ideas about the
>>> world in our minds. Now, this is completely untrue, and one of the
>>> things I do in the book is trace how wrong that is and also how the
>>> real explanation, which is that we seek hard-to-vary explanations,
>>
>> i criticized this before this interview (also before publication of BoI) and DD did not refute my criticism but kept on saying refuted stuff.
>

> Is there anything in those criticisms that you haven't said in your on-line posts?
>
> My summary of the problems with "hard-to-vary":
>
> First problem: By emphasizing "hard-to-vary" DD is de-emphasizing criticism. What we seek are unproblematic explanations - explanations that can't be refuted by any known criticism.
>
> Second problem: "Hard-to-vary" with respect to which constraints? This is not specified but it is important. I think what is meant is hard to vary with respect to the set of failed criticisms of the original explanation. When you vary a "hard-to-vary" explanation it becomes problematic in the light of these failed criticisms.

It's not quite that because the changed idea needs to still solve the original problem too.

You might say that "doesn't solve the problem" is a failed criticism in all cases (except the ones where it succeeds!), but i don't think that's clear to people without saying it. and to count that you'd be using an idea of what criticisms there are of ideas which is different than what criticisms actual humans said (since in some cases no one said that criticism).

There's other things you could say, like changing the idea while keeping all the value or success in tact.


> Third problem: It's not clear if "hard-to-vary" is intended as a figure of merit or as a criticism for ruling out explanations. It would be wrong to use it as a figure of merit because we should never weigh explanations: that is bad epistemology. The correct thing to do is criticise explanations to try to find flaws. Or, if we are stuck, to solve the problem of what to do given we are stuck. The hard-to-vary criterion, then, is useful in so far as it enables us to us see flaws and invent criticisms.
>
> Fourth problem: It gives the impression that knowledge generation is not a binary process. We find a flaw in an idea or not but we don't evaluate it on a continuum.

This one is a criticism because hardness to vary is an amount on a continuum. It leaves a bit much implicit.




Fifth problem: there's also the issue of what "hard" means. does it mean you take an idea and try a trillion random variations and see how many make it better and how many make it worse? and the ideas with the best scores are the hardest to vary? if it doesn't mean that, what's it mean? if it does mean that, why didn't BoI ever explain that? and if this is the meaning, what algorithm is to be used for the random variations? how big should the mean and median changes be? how do you mechanically randomly change ideas?


> Have I missed anything? Is what I wrote accurate/fair?

Sixth problem:

one of my main criticisms of hard-to-vary is that it's equivalent to non-arbitrary (but perhaps less good). and, more importantly, it's best to understand non-arbitrary, hard-to-vary, and several others, and have a deeper perspective on the issue than any one of them (like you wanna see how they are the same, not just understand one of them).

and then one might understand that what we really want is not hardness to vary, what we really want is *knowledge*. the more some kind of criterion corresponds to seeking knowledge, the better it is. what we should be trying to do here is understand what various concepts (like hard-to-vary, non-arbitrary, and others) have to do with knowledge. how well they find knowledge (always or sometimes? if sometimes, what does it depend on?), whether they help indicate amount of knowledge, etc

what others besides non-arbitrary and hard-to-vary? well there's fancy ones like symmetry breaking. but there's also simple ones like: simple, elegant, high explanatory power, lacks unnecessary complications, clear, easy to understand, well organized, addresses the problem it's supposed to, has lots of reach to other issues, solves many different problems, agrees with experiment, agrees with existing philosophy.

these are all the same sort of thing: things you can look at to try to figure out whether an idea is good or not. and what's a good idea, really, what's the ultimate criterion? knowledge.

i think what one wants to do is understand all of these, both on a specific level and also how they fit into the bigger picture. DD doesn't understand he was just adding one more to this list, he presents hard-to-vary as way more fundamental than that. by contrast, "symmetry breaking" is my original idea, but i haven't written quite possibly better than "hard to vary", but i haven't hyped it much

btw what does non-arbitrary mean? well in short, arbitrary ideas aren't knowledge. so then one can consider how to avoid the arbitrary, how is that accomplished? similar to how one might think about how to avoid easy to vary ideas, how is that accomplished?

there's more to it though. like if Bob says X and Jack says Y, and X and Y contradict, then taking sides without further information is arbitrary.

there is also a symmetry between two ideas that contradict, in general, like they have symmetric status and contradiction itself is a symmetric thing. and getting knowledge and making progress have to do with finding ways of breaking the symmetry. so that's, in short, why symmetry breaking is an important concept.

also, what makes something hard to vary? it being non-arbitrary. rather literally. any arbitrary parts are easy to vary (since there's nothing to keep them the same or prevent variation, even arbitrary variation) and non-arbitrary parts have some reason they are not arbitrary so if you change them they mess up that reason so those are hard to vary. changing non-arbitrary knowledge into arbitrary junk isn't an allowed variation.

and btw what's hard to vary, in general? global maxima (perfection) are the hardest and local maxima are also hard. and if it's not a maxima, then the closer it is to one, the harder to vary. and being at a maxima is also a way of picking a point that isn't just an arbitrary point.

and what makes a variation "hard"? well partly whether it can be done arbitrarily (which is easy) or not.

so anyway there's lots of stuff to understand here and BoI isn't much help.

-- Elliot Temple
http://beginningofinfinity.com/

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 4, 2014, at 12:46 AM, Brian Scurfield <brianks...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>
> On 4 Feb 2014, at 01:13, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>>
>> On Feb 2, 2014, at 8:43 PM, Brian Scurfield <brianks...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 2 Feb 2014, at 08:09, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Jan 6, 2012, at 12:11 AM, Josh Jordan <therealj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Here is a lightly edited transcript of David Deutsch's appearance on
>>>>> KERA's "Think" with Krys Boyd on August 29, 2011. The audio is
>>>>> available at http://www.kera.org/2011/08/29/explanations-that-transform-the-world/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> That is, authority in regard to knowledge, though
>>>>> this spread to political authority as well. But then, in the positive
>>>>> sense, what actually caused science, people got really confused and
>>>>> thought that we kind of absorbed knowledge of nature by being open to
>>>>> experience, and that experience somehow implanted true ideas about the
>>>>> world in our minds. Now, this is completely untrue, and one of the
>>>>> things I do in the book is trace how wrong that is and also how the
>>>>> real explanation, which is that we seek hard-to-vary explanations,
>>>>
>>>> i criticized this before this interview (also before publication of BoI) and DD did not refute my criticism but kept on saying refuted stuff.
>>>
>>> Is there anything in those criticisms that you haven't said in your on-line posts?
>>>
>>> My summary of the problems with "hard-to-vary":
>>>
>>> First problem: By emphasizing "hard-to-vary" DD is de-emphasizing criticism. What we seek are unproblematic explanations - explanations that can't be refuted by any known criticism.
>>>
>>> Second problem: "Hard-to-vary" with respect to which constraints? This is not specified but it is important. I think what is meant is hard to vary with respect to the set of failed criticisms of the original explanation. When you vary a "hard-to-vary" explanation it becomes problematic in the light of these failed criticisms.
>>
>> It's not quite that because the changed idea needs to still solve the original problem too.
>

> Right. But would it be strange if you have a variant idea that doesn't solve the problem but against which the original criticisms still fail? I can't think of an example off hand at the moment.

Problem: i want a bike.

proposal: buy bike A.

Criticism 1: bike A is yellow, i like black more

Criticism 2: bike A is too heavy, hard to carry.

variant proposal: buy black iPhone.

the new proposal isn't refuted by either criticism, but doesn't solve the problem.

>> You might say that "doesn't solve the problem" is a failed criticism in all cases (except the ones where it succeeds!), but i don't think that's clear to people without saying it. and to count that you'd be using an idea of what criticisms there are of ideas which is different than what criticisms actual humans said (since in some cases no one said that criticism).
>

> You mean said when considering the original idea and problem? I had in mind failed criticisms that were not necessarily said as most failed criticisms would not actually be said or even thought of consciously. They are just part of background knowledge. But, yeah, it should be made clear that solving the original problem is a constraint!

>
>> There's other things you could say, like changing the idea while keeping all the value or success in tact.
>

> but being careful not to equate "success" with amount of confirmation!

sure, though i don't think saying "it doesn't mean amount of confirmation" will clarify the issue for someone who doesn't already understand. or put another way, i cannot tell what you mean from this particular sentence, or whether you understand it. i can only guess that because i've read prior communications from you.

there are various important, meaningful things like:

- amount of knowledge in an idea
- which part(s) of the idea have the valuable knowledge and which don't
- amount of problems an idea helps with
- how helpful an idea is for addressing a particular problem
- whether an idea solves a hard or easy problem

and if we're so worried about staying far away from justificationism that we don't study issues like this carefully and understand them well, because they seem too near to justificationism, then that's a mistake. perhaps a better mistake than being a justificationist! but it's better to have such a nuanced understanding of justificationism that one can go near it without doing it.


so, do you want to try to write a clear statement of the issues? like about the difference between the amount of value or success an idea has and the amount of confirmation or justification?

>
>>> Third problem: It's not clear if "hard-to-vary" is intended as a figure of merit or as a criticism for ruling out explanations. It would be wrong to use it as a figure of merit because we should never weigh explanations: that is bad epistemology. The correct thing to do is criticise explanations to try to find flaws. Or, if we are stuck, to solve the problem of what to do given we are stuck. The hard-to-vary criterion, then, is useful in so far as it enables us to us see flaws and invent criticisms.
>>>
>>> Fourth problem: It gives the impression that knowledge generation is not a binary process. We find a flaw in an idea or not but we don't evaluate it on a continuum.
>>
>> This one is a criticism because hardness to vary is an amount on a continuum. It leaves a bit much implicit.
>>
>> Fifth problem: there's also the issue of what "hard" means. does it mean you take an idea and try a trillion random variations and see how many make it better and how many make it worse? and the ideas with the best scores are the hardest to vary? if it doesn't mean that, what's it mean? if it does mean that, why didn't BoI ever explain that? and if this is the meaning, what algorithm is to be used for the random variations? how big should the mean and median changes be? how do you mechanically randomly change ideas?
>>
>>> Have I missed anything? Is what I wrote accurate/fair?
>>
>> Sixth problem:
>>
>> one of my main criticisms of hard-to-vary is that it's equivalent to non-arbitrary (but perhaps less good). and, more importantly, it's best to understand non-arbitrary, hard-to-vary, and several others, and have a deeper perspective on the issue than any one of them (like you wanna see how they are the same, not just understand one of them).
>>
>> and then one might understand that what we really want is not hardness to vary, what we really want is *knowledge*. the more some kind of criterion corresponds to seeking knowledge, the better it is. what we should be trying to do here is understand what various concepts (like hard-to-vary, non-arbitrary, and others) have to do with knowledge. how well they find knowledge (always or sometimes? if sometimes, what does it depend on?), whether they help indicate amount of knowledge, etc
>>
>> what others besides non-arbitrary and hard-to-vary? well there's fancy ones like symmetry breaking. but there's also simple ones like: simple, elegant, high explanatory power, lacks unnecessary complications, clear, easy to understand, well organized, addresses the problem it's supposed to, has lots of reach to other issues, solves many different problems, agrees with experiment, agrees with existing philosophy.
>

> These are all good in the sense of enabling us to see criticisms but we should never think of some criterion being satisifed as confirmation an idea is true. So would you agree that what we are looking for are good generic criticisms that help us create knowledge?

yes

> Or did you mean something more?

more: this isn't just useful for coming up with criticisms, it's also useful for understanding epistemology. for example, it helps provide a perspective on the question of what knowledge is.

actually the stuff i was talking about even helps explain why criticism is useful and what really counts as a criticism or not. one way to look at it is criticisms break symmetry (by making one idea criticized and not the other) and anything which doesn't do that isn't a correct criticism.

and it's interesting, in terms of epistemology, because saying X has a merit that Y doesn't have also breaks symmetry. and i've claimed that in all cases it's a genuine merit it can be phrased as a criticism (because Y lacks something good, so that's a criticism). so one question is whether that's true. another is why and whether criticism is such a better perspective than looking for merits if the thing we want to do is break symmetry (rather than steer way way around justificationism).

>
>> these are all the same sort of thing: things you can look at to try to figure out whether an idea is good or not. and what's a good idea, really, what's the ultimate criterion? knowledge.
>

> So, to paraphrase, you're saying we seek ideas that give us better knowledge.

that's one thing i'm saying, out of many.

but also it's not "give us better knowledge". the idea of hard to vary does not give us knowledge. it doesn't "give". it helps us figure out whether an idea has knowledge or not. it helps us sort out good ideas from bad ideas.

>
>> i think what one wants to do is understand all of these, both on a specific level and also how they fit into the bigger picture. DD doesn't understand he was just adding one more to this list, he presents hard-to-vary as way more fundamental than that. by contrast, "symmetry breaking" is my original idea, but i haven't written quite possibly better than "hard to vary", but i haven't hyped it much
>>
>> btw what does non-arbitrary mean? well in short, arbitrary ideas aren't knowledge. so then one can consider how to avoid the arbitrary, how is that accomplished? similar to how one might think about how to avoid easy to vary ideas, how is that accomplished?
>>
>> there's more to it though. like if Bob says X and Jack says Y, and X and Y contradict, then taking sides without further information is arbitrary.
>>
>> there is also a symmetry between two ideas that contradict, in general, like they have symmetric status and contradiction itself is a symmetric thing. and getting knowledge and making progress have to do with finding ways of breaking the symmetry. so that's, in short, why symmetry breaking is an important concept.
>>
>> also, what makes something hard to vary? it being non-arbitrary. rather literally. any arbitrary parts are easy to vary (since there's nothing to keep them the same or prevent variation, even arbitrary variation) and non-arbitrary parts have some reason they are not arbitrary so if you change them they mess up that reason so those are hard to vary. changing non-arbitrary knowledge into arbitrary junk isn't an allowed variation.
>

> I wrote a bit of stuff on non-arbitrary in my original comment but scratched it. It was something like: If you have a variant of an idea that solves the same problem and against which your criticisms still fail, then the part that varied is not covered by any criticism and is arbitrary.

right.

> So "easy-to-vary" is equivalent to arbitrary and "hard-to-vary" is equivalent to non-arbitrary. I don't know why I scratched it now because it's a problem, as you say.

right so why is "hard to vary" so special when something else has this equivalence with it? wouldn't it be better to understand various ideas and their equivalences, instead of promote "hard to vary" as like the solution to epistemology?

non-arbitrary *also* has other value besides this particular equivalence. maybe "hard to vary" does too but that's less clear and BoI didn't make a case for it.

>
>> and btw what's hard to vary, in general? global maxima (perfection) are the hardest and local maxima are also hard. and if it's not a maxima, then the closer it is to one, the harder to vary. and being at a maxima is also a way of picking a point that isn't just an arbitrary point.
>

> Isn't the global maxima infinity? I understand local and global maxima but I'm having trouble picturing it here. Usually in optimisation there is some fitness function but in epistemology figures of merit are a no-no. So how do you get a surface?

if you're looking at solving one specific problem, then in that context there can be various local maxima for attempted solutions and also a global maxima for solving that problem.

if you have three different strategies for solving a particular problem, then you can find the local maximum for each one. there will often be local maximums because middle ground compromises are often worse than doing any half-way-reasonable strategy more seriously and thoroughly. and then when you figure out one of the strategies is actually better than the others overall, its local maximum is also the global maximum for solving this problem (tentatively).

you can also, if you prefer, imagine problems that actually involve numbers. like you're trying to figure out how to build the largest thing (counted by volume of minimum 3d bounding rectangular prism), given some rules (like a budget and list of allowed materials, amount of time it has to be stable standing on its own in particular conditions, etc). so you try an approach with only stone and get a local maximum which is literally your score for what volume you get. i think you can figure out the rest.

you can also consider what 2+2 is, so the global maximum answer is "4". this particular problem lacks local maxima, but some other math problems would have them.


in epistemology, or pretty much in everything, we have to look at stuff in regard to problems. like the same statement can be a criticism in one problem situation and not a criticism in a different problem situation.

what Objectivists say which means the same thing is they emphasize context. problem situation means context. looking at it relative to the problem means looking at it in context.

particular contexts can create "surfaces" (hell they can even make various sorts of weighing functions useful). the surface can be defined in terms of whatever axes are relevant to the problem (so normally that'd be way more than 3 if you wanted to be super precise). (you can even have unusual surfaces and define a special distance function)


once you start looking at stuff as contextual first, and that becomes an intuitive habit, then you may start wondering things like why ideas can have reach (meaning: work in multiple contexts), and how to design ideas to have reach and what attributes cause the reach and what attributes of reality make it possible (in general, or in different fields like epistemology and physics might have different answers). one neat thing about this is i think a lot of people sort of take it for granted and try to look at stuff way too out-of-context most of the time, so then they don't really understand these problems that arise when you learn to normally look in context. it's only once you really focus on context a lot that anything working out of its context starts looking like an amazing exception to investigate.

this is one of the ways philosophy can be deep and advanced discussions can be misunderstood. (because this advanced problem looks so similar to something people already knew about, but having a different perspective on it makes a big difference).


(this is normally where i end my emails and no one follows up by actually trying to go into the questions raised and answer them. sometimes i might be asked for the answer without the person making an effort themselves, but usually not that either. most common is apathy. so it's kind of tempting to prompt people to try to, well, do philosophy, engage with the discussion, make progress, be useful, etc. but if people won't do it without prompting then is it even worth talking to them? so that's an important meta issue, as well as an illustration of how philosophical questions can easily bring up many more philosophical questions, so people should see philosophy as something really deep which they can pursue in all sorts of directions at great length and never run out of philosophical problems)

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 5, 2014, at 12:39 AM, Brian Scurfield <brianks...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> OK.
>
> An idea is said to be justified if it can be supported by some evidence or argument. The more evidence or arguments that support the idea the more justified it is. By claiming justification people claim the truth. Or they claim the idea is more probable. Or good or successful or something like that.

They're claiming it's good. In practice they often make more specific claims (but which ones varies between people), but the best version of justificationism is just that more justified theories are better. It's a way of sorting out good and bad ideas. (Or would be, if it were possible.)

if we just reject justificationism because it says stuff is "true" (infallibly) "or at least probable" (which isn't how probability works), then we won't know what to say when someone makes fallibilist non-probilistic justificationist arguments. we won't really understand what's wrong with justificationism, only what's wrong with infallibilism and misuse of probability.

> A major problem with the idea of justification is that there is never just one idea compatible with some given evidence or argument. Rather, there are always an infinite number of other possible ideas, including possible ideas that contradict the idea claimed to be supported, and justification cannot rule those out. By focusing on the idea under consideration it does not give due consideration to alternatives and explain why they are wrong.

yes the arbitrary selective attention is a huge problem with justificationism.

one way to look at this is the goal is to break the symmetry between all the ideas compatible with some evidence or argument, and justificationists haven't understood this problem in the slightest and their (non-)answer is to simply not break the symmetry and ignore all but one. (or put another way, break the symmetry by their own non-objective choice, rather than in a rational way).


> Justification really just amounts to a declaration of authority that out of the infinite number of other possibilities one's idea is right or successful or probable or what-have-you. It's a mistaken concept.

yes but it's more than that. there's this really common idea that "evidence X supports idea Y". or more generally "idea X supports idea Y". evidence, or the combination of some evidence and some ideas about it, is one important type of idea X.

(note: where it says "idea" you can think of it as meaning any amount of ideas. there's no such thing as how many ideas something counts as, out of context.)

this idea of support is wrong. really badly wrong. it's a complete and utter non sequitur and 99.999% of people think it's cold hard logic and are completely blind to it being nothing more than an arbitrary non sequitur.

so the problem of "support" is one of the main issues of justificationism. (and note that "justification" means support, as one of its meanings).


> To seek truth we must find mistakes and to find mistakes we need criticism. Criticism allows us to tentatively rule out alternative ideas. And not just ideas that are currently thought of but infinite sets of unexamined alternative ideas. Although that always leaves an infinite number of possible ideas remaining, you have nevertheless (tentatively) ruled out infinite sets of alternatives and explained why they are wrong.
>
> So what gives an idea value and makes it successful is not the amount of justification it has. The value is to do with things about the idea such as reach to other problems and also to do with things about the failed criticisms of the idea such as the amount of knowledge they contain.
>
> There's much more that could be said. I haven't even mentioned the regress argument (which I no longer consider so important).

Yeah, the regress is not so important. It's saying something doesn't work for technical reasons when there's other more important problems. It's arguing detail criticism when there's non-detail criticism available.

And the regress is saying like, "look at this chain of arguments, it doesn't work because there's no way to end it". but that is ignoring the elephant in the room: it's not a chain, it's a bunch of chain links, but none of them are actually attached to each other. every link in the chain of arguments is a non sequitur.

when you want to chain up a wolf, and you've got a collection of individual chain links, it doesn't make much sense to say "this isn't going to work, we don't have any solid foundation to attach this chain to". that is worth knowing, at least for an expert, but it's so far out of perspective.

actually it's so out of perspective that justificationists themselves often understand the regress argument, rather than standing there confused and saying "what do you mean these chain links aren't a chain? we taped several of them together". or they even say "huh? that's a normal chain".

-- Elliot Temple
http://elliottemple.com/