00:00:12.640 Well this is part three of chapter nine on optimism from the beginning of infinity.
00:00:17.680 Now I'm recording this right during the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.
00:00:23.920 It was launched on July 16th. Today is July 17th. They don't get to the Moon until July 20th.
00:00:30.880 So hopefully at least one of these episodes will be out on or around July 20th.
00:00:36.240 I was just listening to the great politician Daniel Hannon. I often don't
00:00:40.640 preface any politician's name with great but I think as far as living statesman go
00:00:45.520 and Daniel Hannon is as good as we have right now and he's a great defender of freedom and optimism
00:00:51.440 and he was just speaking to Ben Shapiro. I don't listen to Ben Shapiro very often but Ben Shapiro
00:00:57.520 has an interview series and during his most recent interview he interviewed Daniel Hannon so
00:01:02.880 it was a great conversation and one thing that Hannon was talking about was how American politicians
00:01:09.840 really need to cheer up. Kennedy got to the Moon and helped inspire a generation of people to come
00:01:16.960 with him to come with him on the intellectual journey that was preparations for the Moon
00:01:22.240 because of optimism. Now where is that optimism today? People seem to continually complain about
00:01:28.320 how bad the economy is though it's better than ever. How bad the job rate is though more people
00:01:33.200 are employed than ever. By almost every metric it doesn't matter what country you're in
00:01:38.720 things are getting better unless you're in North Korea. Certainly in America things are getting better
00:01:43.680 in Great Britain. Things are getting better in Australia. Things are getting better. Canada.
00:01:48.080 Things are getting better. Now there are some places where things might be getting a little worse
00:01:53.680 but those are places where they've enacted pessimistic policies and so we just need optimism.
00:01:59.280 We need to have a stance of more freedom rather than less. We need to really be looking at the
00:02:05.360 future and how what the potential of people are and what the potential of people is rather than
00:02:11.200 all the damage that people are doing all the time and so because we think that people are inherently
00:02:15.440 bad and causing all this damage we tend to enact policies. We tend to cause society to move in
00:02:22.240 ways which slows down progress or which regards people with suspicion in some way and this is not
00:02:30.080 good. This is not good for optimism. So let me get into part three. So what we're talking about
00:02:36.880 politicians, leaders, statesmen. Let me return to the section therefore in the beginning of
00:02:42.560 infinity, chapter nine. It is summarising poppers political philosophy and in particular here's
00:02:48.320 philosophy of democracy. So I might repeat a little bit of what I said in the previous episode
00:02:53.840 but I think it's important because if we're going to be led in any direction at the moment
00:02:59.920 the way in which society is organised it is such that a whole bunch of resources are controlled
00:03:06.560 by a small group of people in the form of governments and many of these politicians, many of
00:03:13.360 these leaders are peasants. So given that circumstance and given that we will always make errors
00:03:20.320 in electing people and those people might enact bad policies what therefore should the
00:03:25.840 stance be with respect to what democracy is? Well from the beginning of infinity let me read.
00:03:35.840 Systems of government are to be judged not for their prophetic ability to choose and install
00:03:40.320 good leaders and policies but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.
00:03:46.240 That entire stance is fallibleism in action. It assumes that rulers and policies are always
00:03:51.360 going to be flawed. The problems are inevitable but it also assumes that improving upon them is
00:03:56.080 possible. Problems are soluble. The ideal towards which this is working is not that nothing unexpected
00:04:02.960 will go wrong but that when it does it will be an opportunity for further progress.
00:04:08.480 Now on this I'll just pause here this has met my reflection on this. On this topic of fallibleism
00:04:14.960 and our individual lives. The magician pendulum of pen and telephone. He's a famous libertarian.
00:04:22.800 He's given some excellent speeches over the years about what libertarianism is about.
00:04:29.040 And really for him and for me and for I think proper as well, it's about systems of government
00:04:37.840 that tend to move away from violence where possible. That tend to avoid coercion and force.
00:04:45.120 And so what Pendulette talks about is what would he use a gun for? And he says he's
00:04:51.440 he'd use a gun to stop a murder and he'd use a gun to stop rape. He'd use a gun to defend his
00:04:57.760 country from violent invasion. But then he asks would I use a gun to build a library? And he
00:05:04.720 has a personal reflection in these speeches about how important public libraries are and how
00:05:09.120 important they personally were to him. He says he learned more at his public library than perhaps
00:05:13.920 anywhere else as a child growing up. But he wonders what would he do in order to build a public
00:05:22.160 library? Well he says that he personally would beg people. He would try and persuade them. He'd
00:05:26.960 plea hard and gather funds together if he could. He would maybe even bend the truth a little in
00:05:32.800 order to get those donations. He'd really, really want libraries to be built. But he simply wouldn't
00:05:38.960 use a gun to do it. In other words, he's optimistic that people would be open to persuasion.
00:05:45.680 That the knowledge he has about the possibility of accomplishing projects without coercion
00:05:51.440 could be learned by others. And they would think like him eventually after enough persuasion.
00:05:56.240 Many see this as too hard and ask. It's rare to encounter. It's rare to encounter other genuine
00:06:07.040 libertarians like this or genuine capitalists or genuine freedom lovers, people who
00:06:13.760 genuine optimists in their sense, especially about people. So they think that some coercion,
00:06:20.000 some force, some violence, some amount of bringing guns to the table is necessary in order
00:06:26.160 to do good public works. Because they have this Thomas Hobbesian view about people that people
00:06:32.240 are just animals, barely controlled by the state, and that we don't want to help each other.
00:06:38.800 I think this is completely and utterly false. We do. And we do want public libraries, for example.
00:06:46.560 But the alternative view is that only only force in the form of the state or in the form of
00:06:52.880 government can do things like build libraries, or roads, or social welfare, or any of a large
00:07:00.960 list of things that people think that only governments are able to do in the private industry
00:07:06.160 can never do. Those people are pessimists about the possibility of nonviolence and what reason
00:07:11.760 and knowledge can accomplish. I think I've mentioned before, Neil deGrasse Tyson,
00:07:17.120 the astrophysic, the science communicator in America, he famously talked about how only NASA,
00:07:24.560 and I'm a great lover of NASA, but Neil deGrasse Tyson articulated what I think many people
00:07:31.760 thought, which is that only NASA could ever do space exploration. Only the apparatus of a state
00:07:37.520 with that amount of money could ever hope to explore space. And so that's why we need to fund
00:07:42.640 NASA more and more. This was just prior to Elon Musk setting up SpaceX, and I think it was a little
00:07:50.240 bit after Richard Branson began Virgin Galactic. Private industry is going into space. It would
00:07:57.600 have been better. Had NASA taken, had NASA been able to accomplish what it did without coercion?
00:08:05.040 It did so. That's happened. And it continues to happen. But I suppose of all the things that
00:08:10.560 we're going to steal money for, the exploration of space is better than some things. Okay,
00:08:16.800 this is a spectrum of bad things to steal for. But some people think it can't be done. Some people
00:08:22.960 think that people are just bad or that although they would give money in order to explore space,
00:08:29.280 they would give money in order to help out the poor or they would give money in order to go to
00:08:34.480 the library. The overwhelming majority of people wouldn't, and so this is why we need force,
00:08:38.880 but in other words, they think people are not kind, not good. I'm not generous. A personal anecdote.
00:08:47.760 I don't like these as a rule. They stink of argument from authority, but some people I admit
00:08:54.640 aren't quite there yet simply appreciating the validity of an argument on its own merits.
00:08:59.520 But rather like when someone defends freedom or criticizes taxation or criticizes
00:09:04.800 government and then gets accused of being a privileged rich person. I've never been particularly
00:09:10.240 wealthy. When one supports optimism, not just about the future, but about people,
00:09:15.280 one is accused of having rose-colored glasses. The one needs to get out of their ivory tower or
00:09:20.400 some such. So I'll give you a little taste of my so-called ivory tower. Straight off to high school
00:09:27.600 why I went to university, but throughout my entire time at university, I paid my university fees
00:09:34.640 by working as a security guard, and so my days were quite long. I'd start early in the morning
00:09:39.840 after lectures at university doing physics, and then straight after university, I'd go
00:09:44.560 off to this very large shopping center, you know, a suburb called Bankstown in the western part
00:09:49.360 of Sydney, and I would patrol. I would patrol the center along with a large number of other
00:09:57.920 guards out at that shopping center. I wasn't ever dealing with murder, is it never got quite that
00:10:04.000 bad? But the shopping center was, and it remains this day, one of the largest in Australia, in fact
00:10:08.480 probably one of the largest in the world. And the area that it did at Team Bankstown back then,
00:10:14.000 back in the late 90s, the early 2000s, was a pretty rough area. On Thursday nights, for example,
00:10:19.920 in Australia, there's a tradition of Thursday night shopping, I don't know why, but anyway,
00:10:24.480 on Thursday nights, we'd have anything up to 15 security guards. There's security guard, by
00:10:30.320 the way, is a mall cop for an American. We'd have up to 15 of them patrolling the center,
00:10:36.320 and for various reasons, I don't need to go into the socio-economic issues right now,
00:10:42.000 but there would be balls at this center on Thursday night. Many riots, especially on Thursday
00:10:47.440 nights, there would be shop stealers, there would be a salt, it was a very busy place for a mall
00:10:53.440 cop or a security guard to do work. There was something like 300 different shops in the center,
00:10:59.440 some big, some small, but there was a lot of action going on quite often. Other times, it was
00:11:04.560 quite, but my point is, no one ever phoned our security number, just like no one ever calls emergency
00:11:10.800 services, to say they have a wonderful person with them that they'd like to report to you.
00:11:15.840 You're always being called to the most terrible situations with nasty people doing bad things,
00:11:25.200 and this was almost every shift. Now, full-time police officers aside, I think I have a
00:11:30.640 reasonable idea, as reasonable idea as anyone does, of how bad people can be, of how bad things
00:11:37.120 can get. But the conclusion I drew after this was a good six years of working in this particular
00:11:44.000 role, dealing with these great spectrum of people, is that I don't really think people are bad,
00:11:53.120 I think the reason people act badly is because of bad ideas, the things that they've learned,
00:11:58.720 and those can be changed. So none the less, none the less. I encounter with the reality of
00:12:05.040 certain bad people, leads many, I think, to develop a certain kind of compassion and understanding.
00:12:12.640 But a lack of optimism is about people on an individual level, always calls out for authoritarianism.
00:12:18.640 It says that I'm one of the good people, one of the smart ones, the others, however,
00:12:23.440 they're the ones that can't be trusted, they need to be controlled, and that impulse breeds violence.
00:12:29.840 So when it comes to doing things the government does by force, I really do think
00:12:33.680 and this, again, this is an argument from personal experience, nevertheless. I really do think
00:12:41.360 that the vast majority of people, when they have the means, will indeed help each other out
00:12:47.200 in the way the libertarians think. And I agree with Pendulette, we don't need guns to build libraries.
00:12:53.200 This is not an ivory tower-type rose-tinted glass-view of reality. I know how bad people can be.
00:13:03.600 But the overwhelming majority of people are good people who like to live in a kind of compassionate
00:13:09.520 society. And it doesn't matter if there's a small minority of people who are bad.
00:13:14.960 Okay, so back to the book. Why would anyone want to make the leaders and policies that
00:13:19.760 they themselves favor more vulnerable to removal? Indeed, let me first ask. Why would anyone want
00:13:26.240 to replace bad leaders and policies at all? That question may seem absurd, but perhaps it is absurd
00:13:33.360 only from the perspective of the civilization that takes progress for granted. If we did not expect
00:13:38.160 progress, why should we expect the new leader or policy chosen by whatever method to be any better
00:13:43.920 than the old? On the contrary, we should then expect any changes on average to do as much harm
00:13:49.040 as good. And then the precautionary principle advises, better the devil you know than the devil you
00:13:54.320 don't. There is a closed loop of ideas here. Only assumption that knowledge is not going to grow,
00:13:59.440 the precautionary principle is true. And only assumption that the precautionary principle is true,
00:14:04.560 we can not afford to allow knowledge to grow. Unless a society is expecting its own fact,
00:14:09.760 unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones,
00:14:14.320 it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible. Therefore,
00:14:20.560 purpose criterion can only be met by societies that expect their knowledge to grow and to grow
00:14:25.200 unpredictably. And further, they are expecting that if it did grow, that it would help.
00:14:31.920 This expectation is what I call optimism, and I can state it in its most general form thus.
00:14:37.280 The principle of optimism. All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Optimism is, in the
00:14:47.040 first instance, a way of explaining failure, but professing success. It says that there is no
00:14:52.160 fundamental barrier, no more of nature or supernatural decree preventing progress.
00:14:57.200 Whenever we try to improve things in fail, it is not because the spiteful or unfathomably
00:15:01.840 benevolent gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached the limit
00:15:06.160 on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail,
00:15:10.320 but always because we did not know enough in time. But optimism is also a stance towards the
00:15:15.520 future, because nearly all failures and nearly all successes are yet to come.
00:15:20.880 And so just to pause on that, so the principle of optimism here. All evils are due to insufficient
00:15:27.360 knowledge. So if we pause and reflect on that for a moment, if you had a reject that notion,
00:15:33.600 reject the idea that all evils are due to insufficient knowledge, then you think some evil is not
00:15:39.680 due to insufficient knowledge and can't be addressed by addressing the lack of knowledge,
00:15:45.200 then perhaps you think the evil can be addressed in some other way. Something other than
00:15:49.920 knowledge creation, something other than persuasion. In other words, force, coercion.
00:15:56.480 As for knowledge, a lack of it is due to a lack of creativity. Now this is intimately tied up
00:16:03.840 therefore with people, because people are the things that create explanatory knowledge.
00:16:10.640 So to reject the solution, so to reject the solution to evil as being about creating knowledge
00:16:18.160 is about rejecting the capacity or ability of people to do something about it using creativity.
00:16:24.560 And so this rejection of the potential of people, this anti-humanism is at the heart of pessimism.
00:16:34.480 Back to the book. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world
00:16:38.960 I explained in chapter 3. If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing
00:16:43.600 that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how. Optimism also assumes
00:16:50.080 that none of the prohibitions imposed by the laws of physics are necessarily evils. So for instance,
00:16:55.360 the lack of the impossible knowledge of prophecy is not in superable obstacle to progress,
00:17:00.320 nor insoluble mathematical problems as I explained in chapter 8. Let's pause there, that's an
00:17:05.280 important point. There's lots of things, well at the moment we don't know many of them, that there
00:17:12.480 are, but there are provably unknowable things, or unprovable things we should say,
00:17:20.400 unprovable things in mathematics. And the overwhelming majority of statements in
00:17:25.120 mathematics are unprovable very well. Does this mean there is a limit on, there's a limit on
00:17:33.840 progress because of girls and completeness theory. No, because all those things that are
00:17:39.440 unable to be proved are inherently uninteresting as well. They don't actually help us to solve
00:17:44.160 any problems here in physical reality. So back to the book. That means that in the long run,
00:17:50.880 there are no insuperable evils. And in the short run, the only insuperable evils are parochial ones.
00:17:56.000 There can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure
00:18:00.800 other than certain types of brain damage. Those that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes
00:18:04.800 the past tense personality. For a sick person is a physical object and the task of transforming
00:18:09.040 a subject into the same person in good health is one that no Laura physics rules out.
00:18:13.600 Hence, there is a way of achieving such a transformation that is to say a cure. It is only a matter
00:18:18.880 of knowing how. If we do not for the moment know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know
00:18:23.520 in theory, but we do not yet have enough time or resources, a wealth. Then even so, it is universally
00:18:28.960 true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it in a given time with the available
00:18:34.080 resources, or there is a way of eliminating it in the time and with those resources.
00:18:39.920 Okay, just Paul said as well. David mentions the word universal there and indeed the principle
00:18:47.040 of optimism itself is a universal claim. The all evils are due to insufficient knowledge.
00:18:53.840 Not also this principle of optimism is logically equivalent to problems are soluble,
00:18:59.360 because evil is just a certain kind of problem. A solution is knowledge put into practice.
00:19:05.360 Problems are inevitable. Can also be interpreted as an optimistic view of reality,
00:19:10.640 because problems are not all about suffering and they are not all evils. The suffering type
00:19:18.880 problems and the evil type problems, they are just special cases of problems in general.
00:19:23.760 Problems can be interesting and fun and indeed in the distant future we will have solve suffering,
00:19:29.040 we will have solve suffering. Long time in the future sure, but suffering is a certain kind of pain
00:19:36.000 and inability to persistently solve the same problem ever and ever again. That might cause you
00:19:42.080 unhappiness that can cause you suffering. So problems can indeed be fun. If problems were not
00:19:48.720 inevitable then we'd have no problems and that as David says elsewhere is another word for death,
00:19:55.440 the unproblematic state, which paradoxically would be a problem of course. So logically speaking
00:20:00.800 there's no escape from this problem's inevitable. It's a good thing that the world happens to be
00:20:05.520 this way. But problems are inevitable. It's also an appeal to recognise we cannot prevent problems
00:20:12.640 either. The precautionary principle is a terrible idea. The idea of the precautionary principle is
00:20:18.320 that we should be careful with for example technology, careful with progress, careful with doing
00:20:23.120 too much because we might upset something in cause destruction. But doing nothing is guaranteed
00:20:28.800 to cause destruction. We cannot know about the problems we're yet to encounter and the only
00:20:34.160 guard against them is to make rapid progress. To create lots more knowledge and lots more wealth now,
00:20:42.960 that won't make the problems go away or protect us from them in any sort of perfect sense.
00:20:47.920 It will just make us more able to solve them when we do encounter them. All evils are due to
00:20:54.640 lack of knowledge as a universal claim. So it says something fundamental about reality, about
00:20:59.520 out circumstance. As a fundamental principle it means it touches just about every single facet of
00:21:04.640 our lives. At the heart of some of the worst purported solutions to the big problems that we're
00:21:12.160 encountering right now. Rather than calling them bad solutions we might just call them evasions.
00:21:22.560 The heart of all of these is some kind of pessimism. So for example people who think that people
00:21:27.840 don't like the particular leaders that are in power right now, they want to fiddle with democracy
00:21:32.320 in order to ensure that such a leader can't be elected in the future at some point.
00:21:36.160 Well, they want to reduce democracy in some way. That would lead to a kind of totalitarianism,
00:21:42.960 an appeal to an appeal for undemocratic institutions where it's more and more difficult to remove
00:21:48.400 certain rulers or rules indeed. Pismism about trade and how we shouldn't have a global market.
00:21:56.480 Pismism about people and how we need to value the environment over living sentient people.
00:22:03.040 Pismism about children leading to us to want to control them and to coerce them and have compulsory
00:22:09.440 schooling. Pismism about compassion and kindness meaning that we need to enforce or meaning that
00:22:16.240 we need to steal from people because they won't freely give away their money. There's a whole raft
00:22:21.440 of terrible ideas all of which at their heart, at their root, have pessimism, is motivating them
00:22:27.680 in some way. Pismism typically about people. David then goes on to speak about how death is just
00:22:35.040 another problem. Everyone should be following the work of Aubrey de Grey, Aubrey de Grey who works
00:22:43.840 on life extension science and he would hope to cure death. He regards there as being only a finite
00:22:55.280 number of different problems to solve in order to cure death. I'll just read a small section of
00:23:04.240 what David has written here. Sometimes immortality in this sense is even regarded as undesirable.
00:23:11.520 For instance, there are arguments from overpopulation but those are examples of the
00:23:16.000 Melphusian prophetic fallacy. What each individual surviving person would need to survive at
00:23:20.560 present based standards of living is easily calculated. What knowledge that person would contribute
00:23:24.560 to the solution of the resulting problems is unknowable. There are also arguments about the
00:23:30.000 stratification of society caused by the entrenchment of old people in positions of power.
00:23:34.320 But the traditions of criticism in our society are already well adapted to solving that
00:23:37.840 sort of problem. Even today, it is common in Western countries for powerful politicians or business
00:23:42.080 executives to be removed from office while still in good health. Also on this topic of immortality
00:23:49.120 and curing death, Martin Reese very recently wrote an article and I'll link to that article
00:23:56.000 about how we shouldn't hope the immortality, that it's kind of a moral thing, it's bad.
00:24:03.280 It's a strange impulse as David observed that people would hope for their own death,
00:24:09.280 even while trying to avoid it. It's a strange philosophy.
00:24:13.760 Go back to the book and here is the Parable of Optimism.
00:24:17.280 There's a traditional optimistic story that runs and follows.
00:24:19.600 A hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king but gains reprieve
00:24:24.000 by promising to teach the king's favourite horse to talk within a year.
00:24:27.600 That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain.
00:24:32.240 I'll like, can happen in a year. Horse might die. The king might die. I might die.
00:24:37.360 All the horse might talk. The prisoner understands that while he's immediate problems
00:24:42.720 have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse. Ultimately, the evil he faces is caused
00:24:48.400 by insufficient knowledge. That makes him an optimist. He knows that if progress is to be made,
00:24:53.600 some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance.
00:24:57.680 Progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to and prepares for those inconsiderable
00:25:02.560 possibilities. The prisoner may or may not discover a way of teaching the horse to talk,
00:25:07.200 but he may discover something else. He might persuade the king to repeal the law that he had broken.
00:25:12.160 He may learn a convincing conjuring trick in which the horse would seem to talk.
00:25:15.680 He may escape. He may think of an achievable task that would please the king even more than
00:25:19.760 making the horse talk. The list is infinite. Even if every such possibility is unlikely,
00:25:26.080 it takes only one of them to be realised for the whole problem to be solved.
00:25:29.840 But if our prisoner is going to escape by creating a new idea, it cannot possibly
00:25:33.920 know that idea today. And therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist
00:25:38.640 condition his planning. Optimism implies all the other necessary conditions for knowledge to grow,
00:25:44.720 and for knowledge creating civilisations to last. And hence, for the beginning of infinity,
00:25:49.840 we have, as Papa put it, a duty to be optimistic. In general, end about civilisation in particular.
00:25:55.840 One can argue that saving a civilisation will be difficult. That does not mean there is a low
00:25:59.920 probability of solving the associated problems. When we say that a mathematical problem is hard to
00:26:04.720 solve, we do not mean that it is unlikely to be solved. All sorts of factors determine whether
00:26:09.120 mathematicians even address a problem, and with what effort. If an easy problem is not
00:26:13.920 deemed to be interesting or useful, they might leave it unsolved indefinitely, while hard
00:26:18.240 problems are solved all the time. Usually the hardness of the problem is one of the very factors
00:26:22.720 that cause it to be solved. Thus, President John F. Kennedy said in 1962 in a celebrated example
00:26:27.680 of an optimistic approach to the unknown, we choose to go to the moon in a decade and do the
00:26:31.760 other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Kennedy did not mean that the
00:26:36.880 moon project, being hard, was unlikely to succeed. On the contrary, he believed that it would. What
00:26:41.840 he meant by a hard task was one that depends on facingly unknown. And the intuitive fact to which
00:26:47.280 he was appealing was that all those such hardness is always a negative factor when choosing among
00:26:51.840 means to pursue, when choosing among means to pursue an objective, when choosing the objective
00:26:56.960 itself, it can be a positive one. Because we want to engage with projects that will involve
00:27:01.360 creating new knowledge, and an optimistic expect the creation of knowledge to constitute progress,
00:27:05.920 including its unforeseeable consequences. Thus, Kennedy remarked that the moon project would require
00:27:11.280 a vehicle made of new metal alloys, some of which have not been invented, capable of standing
00:27:16.560 heat and stresses several times more than a very big experience fitted together with a precision
00:27:20.560 better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control,
00:27:25.280 communications, food and survival. These were the known problems, which would require as yet
00:27:31.040 unknown knowledge. That this was on an undried mission, to an unknown celestial body,
00:27:36.480 referred to the unknown problems that made the probabilities and the outcomes profoundly unknowable.
00:27:41.920 Yet none of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission couldn't
00:27:46.240 succeed. This expectation was not a judgment of probability, until far into the project no one could
00:27:51.920 predict that because it depended on solutions not yet discovered the problems not yet known.
00:27:56.960 When people were being persuaded to work on the project and to vote for it and so on,
00:28:00.160 they were being persuaded that our being confined to one planet was an evil,
00:28:04.880 that exploring the universe was a good, and that the US gravitational field was not a barrier,
00:28:09.280 but merely a problem, and that overcoming it and all the other problems involved in the project
00:28:14.080 was only a matter of knowing how, and that the nature of the problems made that moment the right
00:28:18.480 one to try and solve them. Probabilities and prophecies were not needed in that argument.
00:28:24.080 Pessimism has been endemic in almost every society throughout history,
00:28:27.360 it has taken the form of the precautionary principle and of who should rule political philosophies
00:28:31.680 and all sorts of other demands for prophecy and of despair and the power of creativity.
00:28:36.240 And of the misinterpretation of problems as in super-belaborious,
00:28:40.000 yet there have always been a few individuals who see obstacles as problems and see problems
00:28:45.040 as soluble, and so very occasionally there have been places and moments when there was briefly
00:28:49.600 an end to present pessimism. As far as I know, no historian has invested out of the history
00:28:53.760 of optimism, but my guess is that whenever it has emerged in a civilization, there has been a
00:28:57.840 mini-enlightment, a tradition of criticism resulting in an effleresence of many of the patterns
00:29:02.560 of human progress with which we are familiar such as art, literature, philosophy, science, technology,
00:29:07.360 and the institutions of an open society. The end of pessimism is potentially a beginning of
00:29:11.520 infinity, yet I also guess, that in every case, with the single tremendous exception so far,
00:29:17.200 of our enlightenment, this process was soon brought to an end and the reign of pessimism was restored.
00:29:22.640 Now there is a lengthy exposition of a, of some of the bright points where optimism has begun
00:29:36.400 in history and then unfortunately failed. So there was the mini-enlightment during Athens
00:29:42.960 and Athens had many great philosophers, many great thinkers, made lots of progress in politics
00:29:51.280 and ethics and so forth, but eventually was overrun by Sparta in a war and so
00:29:59.680 so pessimism ended up winning there and then there was another short-lived enlightenment as David
00:30:04.880 refers to it in Florence in the, in the early Renaissance. This was funded nurtured by the
00:30:10.800 Medici family, but eventually a charismatic monk. Geolama, seven or older, began to preach
00:30:16.720 apocalyptic sermons against humanism and the Medicis and this great optimistic philosophy
00:30:23.280 and so the dogma of religion ended up violently suppressing all of the, all of the excellent
00:30:31.200 social and indeed economic progress that had happened and so that was the end of optimism there
00:30:36.720 in Florence for a time. Although as David says that, that nascent spark of optimism
00:30:48.960 what fueled the fire of the, of the true enlightenment eventually. There have also been other
00:30:54.800 mini-enlightments, one happened during the Islamic Golden Age from 965 to 1039. So I
00:31:02.400 encourage everyone of course to go to the book and to read the history of optimism there.
00:31:07.040 If there are any budding historians out there, anyone's wanting to write an essay about the
00:31:11.600 history of optimism, that would be a very interesting asset yet largely uncharted part of our
00:31:17.120 knowledge of the way in which societies can become stable over time despite rapid change. We
00:31:24.560 don't know the conditions about what it takes in order for a society like ours to remain peaceful,
00:31:31.360 coherent, and yet able to withstand rapid change. So I'll just read the last part of this chapter
00:31:41.200 now. The inhabitants of Florence in 1494, or Athens in 404 BC, could be forgiven for concluding
00:31:48.640 that optimism isn't just factually, that optimism just isn't factually true. For they need
00:31:54.800 nothing of such things as the reach of explanations, the power of science, or even the rules of
00:31:58.400 nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow
00:32:02.960 when the enlightenment got underway. At the moment of defeat it must have seemed at least plausible
00:32:07.520 to the former optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic
00:32:12.800 Florentines that seven or all might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a
00:32:18.560 whole civilization or in a single individual there must have been unspeakable catastrophes for
00:32:23.440 those that are dead to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people.
00:32:29.200 We should take it personally, for if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded,
00:32:35.440 our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.
00:32:42.880 So that's where David ends the chapter, what a powerful way to end the chapter. And so this is
00:32:47.600 why many of us do get excited about people who push pessimistic theories today. We take it
00:32:58.160 personally, as we should take the failures of optimism in the past. When people talk about
00:33:05.440 reducing progress, curbing freedoms, then this is a dangerous path. We want immortality, we want
00:33:14.640 to go to the stars. We want people to be free to pursue the solutions to their own problems,
00:33:20.640 and this can only happen in their condition of optimism and freedom. But unfortunately, right now,
00:33:28.160 our thought leaders, I can't stand that term, but the thought leaders of the west, rather
00:33:35.920 many of them from politicians through to public intellectuals, are almost universally pessimists.
00:33:42.800 They regret the progress that people have made. They regard the activities of people with great
00:33:52.400 suspicion. They care about inanimate things more than they care about creative people.
00:34:00.640 At least this is the philosophy, this pessimistic philosophy, underpinning the policies that they'd
00:34:06.400 like to impose upon society. So let me finish this epic three-part series on chapter nine,
00:34:14.000 Optimism from the beginning of infinity. By going back to the beginning where I started speaking
00:34:19.040 not only about Martin Reiss, but also Nick Bosstrom, because I think Nick Bosstrom perhaps has even
00:34:28.000 more influence over many public intellectuals globally than what Reiss has. He does
00:34:36.320 seem to be the philosophers philosopher. He is the go-to person, for example, for Sam Harris
00:34:45.120 when it comes to any number of different opinions. The people think philosophy doesn't have
00:34:52.080 an impact, but philosophy infiltrates academia, academia, informs politics, politics reflects the
00:35:01.280 media and the media inform the public. So it's not like these ideas are inert ivory tower
00:35:07.280 discussions. They filter down and become the zeitgeist.
00:35:14.240 Okay, so I'll just finish. It's a fun little thought experiment. I just want to see if we can
00:35:20.000 figure out what's wrong with it. Bosstrom promotes something called the doomsday hypothesis. Now,
00:35:24.560 he didn't come up with this, but he promotes it. So let's read through the doomsday
00:35:29.280 hypothesis. What the doomsday hypothesis is all about, and it's about how we should expect,
00:35:35.200 we should expect that we will go extinct sooner rather than later.
00:35:41.760 It's a probability-based argument. It's a Bayesian argument, so let's see how it goes.
00:35:47.600 So this is the way Bosstrom puts it, and you can find it on his website, but I'll put the link
00:35:54.400 up there as well. Here we go. Bosstrom's version of the doomsday hypothesis. Step one,
00:36:01.600 imagine a universe that consists of 100 cubicles. In each cubicle there is one person,
00:36:06.720 90 of the cubicles are painted blue on the outside and the other 10 are painted red. Each person
00:36:10.720 is asked to guess whether she is in a blue or a red cubicle. Well, suppose you find yourself
00:36:14.880 in one of these cubicles. What color would you think it is? Well, since 90% of people are in
00:36:21.280 blue cubicles, and you don't have any other relevant information, it's saying you should think
00:36:25.200 with 90% probability you're in a blue cubicle. So let's call this idea that you should reason as
00:36:30.720 if you were a red, that you should reason as if you were a random sample from the set of all observers,
00:36:36.080 the self-sampling assumption. Suppose everyone accepts the self-sampling assumption,
00:36:42.000 everyone has to bet on whether they are in a blue or a red cubicle. The 90% of all persons
00:36:50.960 were in their bets and 10% will lose. Suppose on the other hand that the self-sampling assumption
00:36:56.080 is rejected, and people think that one is no more likely to be in a blue cubicle,
00:37:01.280 one is no more likely to be in a blue or a red cubicle, so they bet by sleeping a coin.
00:37:05.600 Then on average, 50% of the people will win and 50% of the people will lose. The rational
00:37:10.960 thing to do seems to be to accept the self-sampling assumption, at least in this case.
00:37:15.360 All right, so yes, in this case, the next step, as Bostrom puts it is this. Let's modify the
00:37:21.920 thought experiment a bit. I should probably say I'm not reading the data in the way that Bostrom
00:37:26.960 has put this. Bostrom has an idiosyncratic way of writing, but it's a bit jarring to me,
00:37:32.960 and so I'm just putting it into my own words more or less. So Bostrom goes on to say,
00:37:37.920 now we're modifying the thought experiment. We still have 100 cubicles, but this time they're not
00:37:41.680 painted blue or red. Instead they're numbered from 1 through to 100. The numbers are painted on the
00:37:45.840 outside. Then a fair coin is tossed. Okay, by God, let's say. If the coin falls heads, one person
00:37:54.160 is created in each cubicle. If the coin falls tails, the persons are only created in cubicles
00:38:00.880 1 through 10. Okay, so that this finite number of cubicles, 1 to 100, God flips a coin. If it's heads,
00:38:08.960 then there's one person that fills in each cubicle from 100, but it fills tails. Then only
00:38:15.680 cubicles 1 through 10 are filled with people. Okay. Now you happen to find yourself in one of
00:38:21.520 the cubicles, and you're asked to guess whether there are 10 or 100 people. Well, at the moment,
00:38:27.040 we can't tell. It's random, we're on the inside of the cubicle. Now the key is before you open the
00:38:35.040 door, because you're going to be allowed to open the door in a minute, that it's kind of a 50-50.
00:38:39.840 It's kind of a 50-50, whether or not there's been 10 people created by God or 100 people created by
00:38:45.280 God. We don't know. Okay. Then we get into the Bayesian stuff here. So let's say you want to
00:38:53.680 apply Bayesian statistics to this. Then what you can do is you can say, well, conditional on heads
00:38:58.560 having being tossed. Let's say you find out that heads have been tossed. Then the probability of
00:39:02.560 your cubicle being between number 1 and number 10 is going to be 1 in 10. Okay, because there's
00:39:08.960 actually 100 cubicles. However, if the coin was tossed and it filled tails, then tails was the condition
00:39:18.320 under which only 1 through to 10 was filled. And if 1 through to 10 was filled, then the probability
00:39:23.440 that you're in 1 to 10 is identically 1. Okay. Now, next step. Suppose you open the door and discover
00:39:31.760 you're in cubicle number 7. And again, you're asked, how did the coin fall? Well, the thing is here,
00:39:38.880 now we now use Bayesian statistics. Now we have additional information. We can now look at all the
00:39:44.640 doors. Okay. There are, it's 1 through to 100, but you're in number 7. So what is the chance that when
00:39:53.280 God flipped the coin, it was such that only 1 through to 10 was filled rather than 1 through 100.
00:39:58.880 Well, in fact, the probability is much higher that it's 1 through to 10 than what you might
00:40:04.000 otherwise think. It's no longer 50, 50. It's certainly not 50, 50. As Bostrom says,
00:40:11.280 the probability is greater than 50% that it filled tails. For what you are observing is given a
00:40:16.480 higher probability on that hypothesis than the hypothesis that it filled heads, the precise
00:40:21.200 new probability of tails can be calculated using Bayesian theorem. It is approximately 91%.
00:40:26.000 So after finding that, you are in cubicle number 7. You should think with 91% probability that
00:40:33.120 there are only 10 people. Very well. Step three. The last step is to transpose these results to our
00:40:41.600 actual situation here on earth. Well, is it? Are we going to be able to use that thought experiment,
00:40:50.400 or we've just thought about there, this completely abstract idea, where people thinking and doing
00:40:56.800 stuff cannot possibly change the probabilities. Are we going to be able to apply that to our
00:41:00.000 situation on earth? Okay, so here's the, see if you can spot the error kind of thing.
00:41:06.000 Let's formulate the following two rival hypotheses. Do merely, as he calls it, do
00:41:11.760 merely as that humankind goes extinct in the next century. In the total number of humans,
00:41:15.040 we'll have, that will have existed to say 200 billion. Or another hypothesis, doom late.
00:41:21.280 Doom late is the idea that humankind survives the next century and goes on to colonize the galaxy.
00:41:26.320 The total number of humans is say 200 trillion. So notice there, he's capped the number of humans
00:41:32.480 at 200 trillion. Why? Well, he's just picked an arbitrary number out of thin air, okay? He could pick
00:41:38.400 anything. Importantly, he could pick infinity. But if he had a picked infinity, well, he doesn't
00:41:42.880 do that. There's an important reason why he doesn't do that because it doesn't suit his purpose.
00:41:46.160 But let's continue. To simplify the exposition, we will consider only these hypotheses.
00:41:52.160 Using a more fine-grained partition of a hypothesis space, doesn't change the principle that
00:41:56.400 would give more exact numerical values. Doom early corresponds to there being only 10 people in
00:42:01.600 the third experiment of step two. Doom late corresponds to there being 100 people. Correspondingly,
00:42:08.000 corresponding to the numbers on the cubicles, we now have the birth ranks of human beings.
00:42:13.760 Their positions in the human race corresponding to the probability 50% of the coin
00:42:18.400 falling heads or tails. When our some probability of doom soon or doom late,
00:42:23.440 this will be based on our ordinary empirical estimates of the potential threats to humans
00:42:27.520 of evil. Okay, so the whole point here is that we know that we are very early on in human evolution.
00:42:37.520 Humans have only been around for what a million years, something like that. Okay, homo sapiens.
00:42:42.400 It might be a bit more than that. I think I saw a number recently. They might have doubled that.
00:42:45.520 Not sure. Anyway, it's early on in our evolution. There has been only about 200 billion people
00:42:52.880 as of the end of, let's say, this century, something like that. Presumably there's going to be
00:43:00.480 up to 200 trillion more, Boston says. The fact that we know we're early on in the history of
00:43:08.480 humanity means that we're kind of like the people that were in the cubicles labeled one to 10.
00:43:16.320 We should expect that knowing that we are early on, that we are well within that one through
00:43:24.480 the 10 period or the one up to a 200 billion people, we should not expect to be in the 200 trillion,
00:43:33.680 that the number of people is 200 trillion. It's more like 200 billion on this hypothesis.
00:43:38.160 What's wrong with this? Well, it casts people once again as inner victims,
00:43:43.840 nothing they can choose to do can change the probabilities on this view.
00:43:49.040 That is simply false. It ignores what people are.
00:43:54.560 This is at the heart. The problem with so many of Boston's apocalyptic views,
00:43:59.200 he calculates always with high probability how people will come to an end by ignoring anything
00:44:04.400 people might do to stop it. He downplays if not completely ignores creativity.
00:44:09.600 Well, he does try to account for creativity such as in his urn with the black balls.
00:44:14.080 There's nothing anyone can do about the black ball. No knowledge. Nothing pulled from his urn
00:44:18.960 after the black ball can possibly do anything about the black ball. Nothing can be done if you are
00:44:24.080 one of the first 200 billion people to prevent the end of humanity. Why? We're also capping
00:44:30.400 the maximum number of people at 200 trillion we don't know. Why doesn't it go on forever?
00:44:34.000 How do you know that doesn't go on forever? Why are we like a fixed number of people in
00:44:39.200 cubicles? Why is that our situation? How are these two things analogous to one other?
00:44:44.800 Can we use probability on infinite sets if there's literally an infinite amount of time before us?
00:44:51.040 So, Boston likes the black ball idea. The idea that there is an insoluble problem.
00:44:58.240 In other words, a physical impossibility because we know problems are soluble.
00:45:02.960 Now, to make his position as strong as possible, he doesn't quite think that there are insoluble
00:45:08.720 problems. But he might think that the solution might not come in time. That's fine.
00:45:15.520 But of course, I return full circle to my original criticism of bottoms overarching philosophy,
00:45:20.640 which is a philosophical pessimist. He always falls back on this idea of frequently
00:45:25.920 falls back on this idea that we just won't solve the problem in time. And that's pessimism.
00:45:31.840 Yes, fine. But the way we can all make guarantee of not solving the problem in time
00:45:38.320 is to enact the exact solution that he wants, which is to slow down progress.
00:45:42.240 Or to fail, if we fail to make progress as fast as possible, then, yes, we're more likely to
00:45:47.600 guarantee our inability to solve problems. Optimists don't argue for slowing down progress.
00:45:54.160 It's the pessimist's debostrum that do. And it could very well be a self-fulfying prophecy,
00:45:59.040 if they succeed. Bostrum and Reese and others are saying some forms of progress are dangerous,
00:46:07.600 that we should slow down. And if we slow down, but if we slow down, if we good people slow down,
00:46:14.480 then this doesn't necessarily slow down the bad people. The bad people that are trying to use
00:46:20.400 technology for evil. And if we're convinced that we should slow down and we do slow down,
00:46:26.640 then the evil people get the destructive technology before we find a solution to it.
00:46:31.280 In other words, the pessimists end up proving themselves correct. But none of them are left
00:46:36.240 to verify that they were correct. That's the problem. So that is the Doomface scenario.
00:46:41.680 We should want to avoid it. And to do that, we need to make faster progress. And we need to
00:46:47.120 create the conditions under which we can make that faster progress. And that requires far more optimism.
00:46:52.160 Thanks for bearing with me for all the many hours for chapter 9 optimism. Eventually,
00:46:58.800 I'll get to chapter 10. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
