David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" Chapter 9 "Optimism" Part 2 of 3

00:00:00.000 This is stuff that really would be magic,
00:00:03.720 it would be considered magic in times past.
00:00:06.880 In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that
00:00:09.160 because there are many things that we take for granted today
00:00:12.240 that weren't even imagined in times past.
00:00:15.160 They weren't even in the realm of magic.
00:00:17.280 So it actually goes beyond that.
00:00:19.800 So I thought, well, if I can do some of those things,
00:00:24.280 basically, if I can advance technology,
00:00:26.480 then that's like magic and that would be really cool.
00:00:29.280 And I was at sort of a slight existential crisis
00:00:34.680 because I was trying to figure out what does it all mean?
00:00:36.840 Like, what's the purpose of things?
00:00:38.680 And I can't really conclusion that if we can advance
00:00:43.240 the knowledge of the world, if we can do things
00:00:46.520 that expand the scope and scale of consciousness,
00:00:50.560 then we're better able to ask the right questions
00:00:53.560 and become more enlightened.
00:00:54.800 And that's really the only way forward.
00:00:59.680 Welcome to Topcast, part two of chapter nine, optimism.
00:01:02.800 That was Elon Musk who, of course, is just getting on
00:01:04.800 and doing what's fun and a longer way
00:01:06.480 solving lots of problems and improving things
00:01:08.440 of people of today and tomorrow.
00:01:10.320 That was him speaking at Caltech
00:01:12.000 during a commencement speech.
00:01:13.400 I think back in 2018, in today's episode,
00:01:16.520 there's a real focus on optimism as applied to people,
00:01:19.240 to our institutions and to us as individuals.
00:01:22.080 People and knowledge creators, and we just heard from Elon
00:01:24.600 there that he has felt that his calling
00:01:26.760 was to create knowledge and quite right.
00:01:28.720 That's us, that's our nature of anything is our nature,
00:01:31.440 to create knowledge.
00:01:32.400 We don't all have to be creating knowledge about rockets
00:01:34.800 or rapid transportation systems.
00:01:36.840 We might just be creating knowledge in our own lives
00:01:38.840 about how to best have tomorrow be better than today.
00:01:42.200 But we're all striving to solve our problems.
00:01:43.800 We're all equal in that.
00:01:45.280 So let's continue.
00:01:48.680 Continue with the book.
00:01:50.640 Further misconception is Hawking's analogy
00:01:53.200 between our civilization and pre-enlightenment civilizations.
00:01:55.920 So as I shall explain in chapter 15,
00:01:59.080 there is a qualitative difference
00:02:00.360 between those two types of civilization.
00:02:02.720 Culture shock need not be dangerous
00:02:05.000 to a post-enlightenment one, skipping a little bit,
00:02:08.800 and David Rides, in the case of our civilization,
00:02:12.280 the precautionary principle rules itself out.
00:02:15.640 Since our civilization has not been following it,
00:02:18.720 a transition to it would entail
00:02:21.160 raining in the rapid technological progress
00:02:24.160 that he's underway.
00:02:25.640 And such a change has never been successful before.
00:02:30.160 So a blind pessimist would have to oppose it on principle.
00:02:34.000 So, and this is me, in other words,
00:02:37.080 just for a little bit of exposition on just that bit,
00:02:39.960 which I found subtle,
00:02:44.000 is that our civilization is the one
00:02:46.000 that has been making progress.
00:02:48.440 So in a way, the precautionary principle,
00:02:50.680 the proposed principle says avoid making big changes
00:02:54.720 because they're dangerous, avoid making progress
00:02:58.040 because it's dangerous.
00:02:59.560 In this case, it would seem to implore us
00:03:01.880 not to make any big changes to our society,
00:03:04.800 which is the very society that's undergoing big changes.
00:03:08.640 It's kind of self-refuting.
00:03:09.960 Well, it is self-refuting in that way.
00:03:12.560 And David Rides, this may seem like logic chopping,
00:03:16.280 but it is not.
00:03:17.280 The reason for these paradoxes and parallels
00:03:19.320 between blind optimism and blind pessimism
00:03:21.520 is that those two approaches
00:03:22.560 are very similar to the level of explanation,
00:03:24.960 both prophetic, both poor to know
00:03:27.080 unknowable things about the future of knowledge.
00:03:29.400 And since at any instant,
00:03:31.080 our best knowledge contains both truth and misconception,
00:03:34.200 prophetic pessimism about anyone aspect of it
00:03:36.760 is always the same as prophetic optimism about the other.
00:03:39.720 For instance, Rhesus worst for use depend upon the
00:03:42.320 unprecedented rapid creation of unprecedented powerful
00:03:45.280 technology, such as civilization destroying bioweapons.
00:03:49.440 If Rhesus is right, that the 21st century is uniquely dangerous,
00:03:53.120 and if civilization nevertheless survives it,
00:03:55.160 it will have had an appallingly narrow escape.
00:03:58.000 Our final century mentions only one other example
00:04:00.520 of a narrow escape, namely the Cold War.
00:04:02.880 So that will make two narrow escapes in a row.
00:04:05.600 Yet by that standard civilization must already have had
00:04:07.960 a similarly narrow escape during the Second World War.
00:04:10.520 For instance, Nazi Germany came close
00:04:12.280 to developing nuclear weapons.
00:04:13.680 The Japanese Empire did successfully weaponize
00:04:15.920 bubonic plague and attested the weapon
00:04:17.840 with devastating effect in China,
00:04:20.040 and had plans to use it against the United States.
00:04:22.640 Many feared that even a conventionally won victory
00:04:25.080 by the Axis powers could bring down civilization.
00:04:27.680 Churchill warned of a new dark age,
00:04:29.280 made more sinister and perhaps more protracted
00:04:31.120 by the lights of perverted science.
00:04:32.960 Though as an optimist, he worked to prevent that.
00:04:36.080 In contrast, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig
00:04:38.600 and his wife committed suicide in 1942.
00:04:41.080 In the safety of neutral Brazil,
00:04:42.800 because they considered civilization to be already doomed.
00:04:46.080 So that would make it three narrow escapes in a row.
00:04:49.160 But was there not a still earlier one?
00:04:51.920 In 1798, Malthus had argued,
00:04:54.640 and his influential essay on population,
00:04:57.000 that the 19th century would inevitably
00:04:59.040 see a permanent end to human progress.
00:05:01.560 He had calculated that the exponentially growing population
00:05:04.400 at the time, which was a consequence
00:05:06.320 of various technological and economic improvements,
00:05:08.360 was reaching the limit of the planet's capacity
00:05:10.160 to produce food.
00:05:11.680 And this was no accidental misfortune.
00:05:14.000 He believed that he had discovered a law of nature
00:05:16.400 about population and resources.
00:05:18.360 First, the net increase in population in each generation
00:05:21.040 is proportional to the existing population.
00:05:23.320 So the population increases exponentially,
00:05:25.280 or in geometrical ratio, as he put it.
00:05:28.000 But second, when food production increases,
00:05:30.600 for instance, as a result of bringing
00:05:31.800 formally unproductive land into cultivation,
00:05:34.080 the increase is the same as it would have been
00:05:35.840 if that innovation happened in any other time.
00:05:38.000 It is not proportional to whatever the population
00:05:41.080 happens to be.
00:05:41.920 He called this rather idiosyncratically,
00:05:44.080 an increase in arithmetic ratio.
00:05:46.760 And argued that population, when unchecked increases
00:05:49.480 in geometric ratio, subsistence increases only
00:05:52.320 in arithmetic ratio, a slight acquaintance with numbers,
00:05:56.520 will show the immensity of the first power
00:05:58.560 in comparison with the second.
00:06:00.520 His conclusion was that the relative well-being
00:06:03.120 of humankind in this time was a temporary phenomenon,
00:06:05.840 and that he was living at a uniquely dangerous moment
00:06:07.800 in history.
00:06:08.920 The long-term state of humanity
00:06:10.720 must be an equilibrium between the tendency
00:06:12.960 of populations to increase in the one hand
00:06:14.840 and on the other starvation, disease, murder, and war.
00:06:18.040 Just as happens in the biosphere.
00:06:20.040 In the event, throughout the 19th century,
00:06:22.240 a population explosion happened.
00:06:24.360 Much as mouthless had predicted.
00:06:26.160 Yet the end of human progress that he had
00:06:27.920 for seeing did not, in part,
00:06:30.120 because food production increased even faster
00:06:32.160 than the population.
00:06:33.440 Then, during the 20th century,
00:06:35.160 both increased farther still, or pause there.
00:06:38.080 This is a hobby horse of mine, I suppose.
00:06:41.040 I've cataloged some other people
00:06:43.080 who've made similar prophecies of doom over the decades.
00:06:46.160 They do happen rather regularly now.
00:06:48.520 There's people who appear in the media all the time,
00:06:51.000 talking about the doom that is to come.
00:06:53.640 There's money to be made in doomsday.
00:06:55.840 The media likes the pessimists,
00:06:57.880 but not so much the optimists.
00:06:59.640 If you want to read some more criticism of mouthless
00:07:01.920 and those who followed in these footsteps
00:07:03.360 all the way through to today,
00:07:05.400 you can Google my essay that I have titled,
00:07:07.800 cosmological economics,
00:07:09.480 why infinite growth is no bad thing.
00:07:11.560 And that's my summary of Malthusian pessimism
00:07:15.880 over the last few decades.
00:07:17.840 And alternatives to it, following David, of course,
00:07:21.600 especially in this present chapter.
00:07:23.520 Anti-humanism in pessimism are tied together,
00:07:25.680 or as I like to say, pessimism broadly speaking,
00:07:28.680 is the fundamental field out of which
00:07:31.040 those other special cases are excitations.
00:07:34.120 Those excitations are the pessimists' field.
00:07:36.400 Things like anti-humanism and socialism
00:07:39.440 or other forms of authoritarianism or anti-natalism
00:07:42.400 and certain kinds of affective altruism and so on.
00:07:46.280 The affective altruists will get upset at me,
00:07:48.120 but if you go to the EAA website,
00:07:51.840 the www.effectiveoutroism.org website,
00:07:55.360 and you just go to their about section,
00:07:58.160 which is the article titled,
00:08:00.000 Introduction to Effective Outroism.
00:08:04.240 It's basically a catalog of all these
00:08:06.120 concerns we find elsewhere.
00:08:09.600 They're very much worried.
00:08:10.680 Like, Bostrom is about existential risk,
00:08:12.840 and they think that we need to have some form of redistribution.
00:08:17.320 That's the kind of the theme, but they
00:08:19.920 suggest that you give to charity
00:08:21.960 in order to redistribute the money.
00:08:23.760 I don't think they're not really forthcoming
00:08:26.840 with the top-down authoritarian approach yet.
00:08:31.960 I always get suspicious when altruism doesn't begin
00:08:35.960 with either one's self or with one's local community,
00:08:39.560 but is then focused on these massive global things.
00:08:44.440 Because the more distant you get from the problem
00:08:47.680 you're trying to solve, the less you tend to know about it.
00:08:50.480 Will McCaskle, the philosopher, one of the people
00:08:52.960 who are credited with coming up with a lot of the philosophy,
00:08:57.080 surrounding effective altruism,
00:08:59.840 he talks about this case of the play pump.
00:09:03.360 The play pump was an invention, which
00:09:06.600 seemed like a good idea at the time to help people
00:09:09.200 in Africa pump water from wells.
00:09:12.240 The old hand pumps seemed to be too much work,
00:09:14.800 so they invented this thing called the play pump
00:09:16.520 that kids could jump on and play like a merry-go-round
00:09:19.840 and push around, and it would pump water as well.
00:09:22.720 As it turned out, the play pump is a terrible idea
00:09:26.120 because kids don't want to plant it.
00:09:27.560 It's too hard, and so now you have a situation
00:09:29.560 where in certain places in Africa,
00:09:32.360 if the play pump still exists, it has
00:09:33.960 to be pushed in a rather undignified way
00:09:35.960 by the old women of the village.
00:09:38.400 What's the lesson here?
00:09:39.280 The lesson here is that if you yourself are not
00:09:44.560 if you yourself are not experiencing the problem
00:09:48.200 and you try and solve someone else's problem
00:09:50.880 without consulting them.
00:09:52.560 So probably the best of the bad bunch
00:09:55.280 is to simply give them money, to give them cash.
00:09:57.440 If you're going to force a solution onto anyone,
00:10:00.520 well, he have some money.
00:10:03.200 Now, we can get into political ideas
00:10:05.200 about the liability of doing money.
00:10:06.560 The actual solution, of course, to people in poverty
00:10:09.520 is to trade with them, is to find something of value
00:10:13.280 that they can give to you.
00:10:14.360 And there's always something of value
00:10:16.240 that they can give to you, always.
00:10:17.840 People are creative, unique individuals,
00:10:20.960 and given the opportunity, they will sell you something.
00:10:23.960 And you will want to buy it.
00:10:25.320 And so this is the way, this idea of having free trade
00:10:30.560 of allowing people to enter wealthy markets
00:10:33.800 who themselves aren't wealthy and then to improve their lot.
00:10:36.920 This is what history shows, works and reduces
00:10:40.840 and will eliminate poverty if we allow it to.
00:10:45.160 Top down solutions tend to do quite the opposite.
00:10:48.880 Their pessimistic ideas about how people's creativity
00:10:53.880 doesn't have sufficient value that we would like to invest in
00:10:57.640 or that we, more wealthy people would like to invest in,
00:11:00.280 but I think that's simply false.
00:11:05.240 Okay, let's continue with the book.
00:11:06.840 Malthus had accurately foretold the one phenomenon,
00:11:10.040 but had missed the other altogether.
00:11:11.440 Why?
00:11:12.440 Because of the systematic pessimistic bias
00:11:15.040 to which prophecy is prone.
00:11:17.160 In 1798, the forthcoming increase in population
00:11:19.560 was more predictable than the even larger increase
00:11:21.560 in food supply, not because it was in any sense
00:11:23.840 more probable, but simply because it depended less
00:11:26.160 on the creation of knowledge by ignoring that structural
00:11:29.200 difference between the two phenomenon
00:11:31.000 that he was trying to compare.
00:11:32.400 Malthus slipped from educated guesswork
00:11:34.640 in the blind prophecy.
00:11:36.320 He and many of his contemporaries were misled
00:11:38.880 into believing that they had discovered an objective asymmetry
00:11:42.280 between what he called the power of population
00:11:44.280 and the power of production.
00:11:45.760 But that was just a parocha mistake.
00:11:47.720 The same one that Mickelson and Lagrange made,
00:11:50.560 they all thought they were making sober predictions
00:11:52.600 based on the best knowledge available to them.
00:11:54.400 In reality, they were all allowing themselves
00:11:56.240 to be misled by the interluctible fact
00:11:58.080 of the human condition that we did not yet know
00:12:00.240 what we have not yet discovered.
00:12:02.320 Let me pause there.
00:12:03.560 So Martin Reese, Nick Bostrom, anyone
00:12:08.480 who thinks they can extrapolate based upon the best
00:12:12.440 of today's knowledge into the future,
00:12:14.240 ignores that that we can't know what we have not yet
00:12:17.520 discovered.
00:12:18.360 And so it wouldn't matter if you've got a wonderfully
00:12:21.600 complex set of mathematical formula and charts
00:12:26.120 and graphs that you can extrapolate.
00:12:28.520 Those charts and graphs, just as Malthus did,
00:12:31.760 all the way back in 1798, can lead you into gross error.
00:12:36.840 Because you can't possibly hope to know
00:12:38.800 what is going to be discovered tomorrow,
00:12:40.880 let alone in 10 years, let alone in 100 years,
00:12:43.520 that will completely change the calculus,
00:12:46.720 completely change your priors,
00:12:49.520 and therefore upset your Bayesian reasoning.
00:12:53.320 It's not Bayesian reasoning, it's Bayesian unreasonable.
00:12:56.760 David mentions their educated guesswork.
00:12:59.400 And I just want to go off on a little tangent about that as well.
00:13:04.480 This would be a very narrow genre of epistemology.
00:13:07.720 This concept of educated guesswork.
00:13:10.560 It's rather, I suppose, the kind of thing
00:13:13.760 that medical doctors might be often up to.
00:13:16.480 So when you've got a complex system,
00:13:17.880 like the human body and the time arise
00:13:20.280 and I'm solving a particular problem in front of you
00:13:22.000 is really short.
00:13:23.240 So if we don't get the answer with the next few minutes
00:13:25.240 or hours or, you know, most days, the patient might die.
00:13:29.720 It's important we distinguish between wild guessing,
00:13:32.880 which is what many of us might engage in
00:13:35.280 if we're trying to figure out what's wrong with us medically.
00:13:39.400 And educated guesswork, which is what the experienced doctor
00:13:42.760 might engage in, seeing the same symptoms.
00:13:46.800 The latter, educated guesswork,
00:13:48.480 is really about when we have competing good explanations.
00:13:52.600 The same symptoms, but different causes.
00:13:55.280 We want to know the cause so we can find the appropriate treatment
00:13:58.720 and that would come with experience.
00:14:01.880 Now this is rather unlike what happens
00:14:03.880 with, let's say, climate change.
00:14:06.480 There, the climate is also a complex system
00:14:08.960 like the human body.
00:14:10.360 However, the change that happens
00:14:11.920 is not a matter of minutes, hours and days.
00:14:16.000 The time horizon is far, far greater.
00:14:18.720 It's a time horizon within which knowledge can be created
00:14:21.880 by people that can affect the outcome.
00:14:24.520 And lots of knowledge can be created in years and decades,
00:14:27.560 the time in which the climate change is supposed to happen
00:14:30.680 at earliest, at earliest.
00:14:32.240 I mean, many of the predictions are, you know,
00:14:34.080 you're talking many decades or centuries.
00:14:37.440 Now this is unlike with a patient
00:14:39.120 who has just come into the emergency department.
00:14:41.880 The patient, the proverbial patient
00:14:43.920 has just turned up at the emergency department.
00:14:47.120 Our educated guesswork is required
00:14:49.000 because nothing is going, no new knowledge is going to be created.
00:14:52.160 No new explanatory theory is going to be sent down
00:14:57.040 by the oncologists or by the medical scientists
00:15:01.720 that is going to change the decision of that doctor
00:15:04.400 within the next couple of minutes, extremely unlikely.
00:15:07.600 However, for the expert climatologists
00:15:10.320 that are trying to figure out what's going to happen
00:15:11.920 with the climate and devise possible solutions
00:15:14.680 for the climate, we're talking about, again,
00:15:17.560 years to decades, centuries, a time during which
00:15:21.880 the educated guesswork can be completely undone.
00:15:25.520 The educated guesswork at that point
00:15:27.560 is indistinguishable from blind guessing,
00:15:32.040 from wild guessing, okay?
00:15:34.200 Because we might very well create knowledge
00:15:37.360 over the next few years that can completely change
00:15:39.640 what the outcome is going to be.
00:15:41.360 Okay, so David writes,
00:15:43.360 another mouthless, no race intended to prophesy.
00:15:46.960 They were warning that unless we saw certain problems
00:15:49.120 in time, we are doomed.
00:15:51.560 But that has always been true, and always will be.
00:15:54.120 Problems are inevitable.
00:15:55.320 As I said, many civilizations are fallen,
00:15:57.520 even before the dawn of civilization,
00:15:59.040 all of our sister species, such as the Ninianderthals,
00:16:02.080 became extinct through challenges
00:16:03.680 with which they could easily have coped,
00:16:05.360 had they known how genetic studies suggest
00:16:07.960 that our own species came close to extinction
00:16:09.800 about 70,000 years ago.
00:16:11.360 As a result of an unknown catastrophe,
00:16:13.000 which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand,
00:16:15.440 being overwhelmed by these and other kinds of catastrophe
00:16:18.400 would have seemed to the victims
00:16:20.000 like being forced to play Russian roulette.
00:16:22.520 That is to say, it would have seemed to them
00:16:24.600 that no choices that they could have made,
00:16:26.320 except perhaps to seek the intervention
00:16:27.760 of the gods more diligently,
00:16:29.200 could have affected the odds against them.
00:16:31.280 But this was a parochial error.
00:16:33.040 Civilization starved long before Malthus,
00:16:35.760 because of what they thought of
00:16:37.160 as the natural disasters of drought and famine.
00:16:40.160 But it was really because of what we would call
00:16:41.880 poor methods of irrigation and farming.
00:16:43.600 In other words, lack of knowledge, skipping a bit now.
00:16:48.640 And then David writes,
00:16:50.400 If a one kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth
00:16:52.640 on a collision course at any time in human history
00:16:54.760 before the early 21st century,
00:16:56.360 it would have killed at least a substantial proportion
00:16:58.320 of all humans.
00:16:59.480 In that respect, as in many others,
00:17:01.280 we live in an era of unprecedented safety.
00:17:04.440 The 21st century is the first ever moment
00:17:07.360 when we have known how to defend ourselves
00:17:09.680 from such impacts, which occurred once every 250,000 years or so.
00:17:13.440 Now this may sound too rare to care about,
00:17:15.560 but it is random.
00:17:16.920 A probability of one in 250,000
00:17:18.680 of such an impact in any given year
00:17:21.640 means that a typical person on Earth
00:17:22.960 would have a far larger chance of dying
00:17:24.760 of an asteroid impact than in an airplane crash.
00:17:27.680 And the next such object to strike us
00:17:29.400 is already out there at this moment,
00:17:30.880 speeding towards us with nothing to stop
00:17:32.440 but except human knowledge.
00:17:34.600 Civilization is vulnerable to several other known types
00:17:37.160 of disaster, with similar levels of risk.
00:17:39.160 For instance, ice ages occur more frequently than that,
00:17:41.600 and many ice ages occur much more frequently.
00:17:44.240 And some climatologists believe
00:17:46.520 that they can happen with only a few years' warning.
00:17:48.480 A super volcano, such as the one lurking under Yellowstone
00:17:50.960 National Park could blot out the sun for years at a time.
00:17:53.320 If it happened tomorrow,
00:17:54.480 our species could survive by growing food
00:17:56.560 using artificial light and civilization could recover.
00:17:59.320 Many would die, and the suffering would be so tremendous
00:18:02.160 that such events should merit
00:18:04.480 almost as much preventative effort as an extinction.
00:18:08.160 We do not know the probability of a spontaneously occurring
00:18:11.320 in curable plague, but we may guess
00:18:14.160 that it is unacceptably high.
00:18:16.160 Since pandemic such as the Black Death in the 14th century
00:18:19.480 have already shown us the sort of thing
00:18:21.240 that can happen on a time scale of centuries.
00:18:23.520 Should any of these catastrophes alone,
00:18:25.400 we now have at least a chance of creating
00:18:27.840 the knowledge required to survive in time.
00:18:30.760 We have a chance because we are able to solve problems.
00:18:33.360 Problems are inevitable.
00:18:34.800 We shall always be faced with the problem
00:18:36.160 of how to plan for the unimaginable future.
00:18:39.400 We shall never be able to afford to sit back
00:18:41.400 and hope for the best.
00:18:42.920 Even if our civilization moves out into space
00:18:45.280 in order to hedge its bets
00:18:46.720 as recent hawking both rightly advised,
00:18:49.240 a gamma ray burst in our galactic vicinity
00:18:51.720 would still wipe us all out.
00:18:53.600 Such an event is thousands of times rare
00:18:55.600 as an asteroid collision,
00:18:56.920 but when it does finally happen,
00:18:59.000 we shall have no defense against it
00:19:00.800 without a great deal more scientific knowledge
00:19:03.320 and an enormous increase in our wealth.
00:19:06.520 Of course, there's a minor affliction.
00:19:08.960 We should note there as David does,
00:19:11.480 the gamma ray bursts are known.
00:19:14.320 At least we know they exist.
00:19:16.760 But what about things we don't yet know about?
00:19:19.160 Well, they're infinite.
00:19:21.120 And in some sense, more scary.
00:19:24.680 This is what is astonishing with the pericule way
00:19:26.720 of thinking that animates people that are engaged
00:19:29.080 in certain kinds of political discussions.
00:19:31.880 Rather so often, our focus simply on this so-called
00:19:34.960 big problem that requires all of us
00:19:37.000 to donate massive resources towards and worse
00:19:40.400 to curb wealth creation, the very thing that can help us
00:19:43.480 with the problems that we don't yet know about.
00:19:47.240 Wealth to many people is, of course, a dubious thing.
00:19:50.120 It's an immoral thing.
00:19:51.680 And this is another deeply religious notion.
00:19:54.480 It comes to us via a bad cultural meme.
00:20:00.040 The idea that poverty is a virtue.
00:20:02.320 And it's not merely a Christian idea.
00:20:04.040 The East has it as well.
00:20:05.720 But the assumption is that the problems we have now
00:20:08.560 are the biggest problems we will have tomorrow.
00:20:12.200 And the heart of the problem, rather too often,
00:20:15.560 is regarded as being us.
00:20:18.320 And all of that is, in fact, the biggest problem.
00:20:21.280 This idea that we are the cause of the biggest problems
00:20:24.160 and these biggest problems that we have today
00:20:25.840 are going to continue through
00:20:27.840 to being the biggest problems tomorrow.
00:20:29.920 But until we recognize that, in fact,
00:20:31.960 it is people who are the solution.
00:20:35.120 And wealth is a great thing, and we need,
00:20:37.200 we need so much more of it to help fund people's creativity.
00:20:42.040 So we can engage with these problems we haven't foreseen
00:20:45.240 that might arise tomorrow or the next day.
00:20:48.280 We may well end up causing events
00:20:50.600 that bring to pass our own demise,
00:20:52.880 because we have slowed down our wealth creation
00:20:55.880 too much, too quickly.
00:20:58.120 Or even at all.
00:20:59.360 Any amount of slowing wealth creation in progress
00:21:02.720 is very dangerous.
00:21:05.600 This whole idea that we are the problem,
00:21:08.400 there's too many people in the planet.
00:21:11.200 Begin to this rather religious type premise.
00:21:14.160 It's sort of this idea from Thomas Hobbs almost
00:21:18.280 that we're all evil, or the idea from Genesis
00:21:22.440 that we're born with original sin.
00:21:26.720 We hear it, that we should be careful
00:21:29.640 about exploring the cosmos,
00:21:30.880 because we're going to polluted
00:21:32.400 as we've polluted the earth, polluted this planet.
00:21:34.760 That's the environmentalist concern.
00:21:36.440 And that we shouldn't have more children,
00:21:38.360 because people just exist in a state of suffering
00:21:40.960 and to bring more people into the world
00:21:43.000 is a terribly immoral thing.
00:21:44.600 This is the anti-natalists so-called view.
00:21:48.000 That the anti-natalists, I think, like environmentalists.
00:21:50.320 They all think they're on the side of morality.
00:21:53.120 They think they're on the side of doing good.
00:21:57.680 But morality is really, as David says elsewhere
00:22:02.080 in the beginning of the infinity,
00:22:02.920 that one moral injunction is not to destroy
00:22:05.000 the means of error correction.
00:22:07.720 And I suppose that has a few corollaries,
00:22:09.520 that would mean we should increase the amount
00:22:13.000 of error correction.
00:22:13.840 We have not merely failed to destroy it.
00:22:16.600 But also, where we have the opportunity to,
00:22:19.200 to increase our rate of error correction.
00:22:21.680 How do we do that?
00:22:22.760 Creativity.
00:22:23.920 Who's creative?
00:22:24.880 People.
00:22:25.720 Therefore, we need more of them.
00:22:27.320 We need more people to create the errors
00:22:29.520 that we have and the errors are infinite.
00:22:31.440 And we will continue to be confronted by them.
00:22:33.880 And of course, one way to do is just to have
00:22:37.000 global suicide to remove everyone
00:22:39.560 and then there is absolutely no problem at all.
00:22:42.800 I think this is a terrible idea,
00:22:44.640 but some people take it seriously.
00:22:46.120 Some people think that people are evil.
00:22:49.760 Whereas I think that people are a source of progress
00:22:53.120 and are the only thing that can create good
00:22:55.320 in this universe.
00:22:57.760 So those who want to curb human life in one way
00:23:00.840 to treat us like some sort of cosmic virus,
00:23:05.520 they're about curbing creativity.
00:23:07.600 They're about reducing creativity.
00:23:09.480 In the form of us, they're about slowing down
00:23:11.880 error correction or perhaps stopping error correction
00:23:14.320 altogether.
00:23:15.120 If they can stop the birth of people.
00:23:17.880 But given that people are the means of error correction,
00:23:20.200 we need more of them.
00:23:21.600 That's optimism.
00:23:22.920 People are knowledge creators.
00:23:25.320 So they reduce evil in the world.
00:23:27.320 Okay, skipping a little bit and then David writes,
00:23:30.360 how can we formulate policies for the unknown
00:23:33.960 if we cannot derive them from our best existing knowledge
00:23:37.360 or from dogmatic rules of thumb
00:23:38.960 like blind optimism or pessimism?
00:23:41.000 Where can we derive them from?
00:23:43.160 Like scientific theories, policies cannot be derived
00:23:45.720 from anything.
00:23:46.800 They are conjectures and we should choose between them
00:23:49.520 not on the basis of their origin,
00:23:51.160 but according to how good they are as explanations,
00:23:54.320 how hard to vary.
00:23:56.040 Like the rejection of empiricism.
00:23:58.200 End of the idea that knowledge is justified to believe.
00:24:01.280 Understanding that political policies are conjectures
00:24:03.680 entails the rejection of a previously unquestioned
00:24:05.880 philosophical assumption.
00:24:07.440 Again, Papa was a key advocate of this rejection.
00:24:10.640 He wrote, and this is one of my favorite passages
00:24:14.560 that Papa did ever write.
00:24:17.400 It's a huge discovery in epistemology.
00:24:22.160 In fact, it really does form the core of Papa's epistemology.
00:24:30.240 So let me read the quote that David has put
00:24:33.160 into the beginning of infinity.
00:24:35.160 Papa wrote,
00:24:36.840 The question about the sources of our knowledge
00:24:39.560 has always been asked in the spirit of,
00:24:41.880 what are the best sources of knowledge?
00:24:43.960 The most reliable ones.
00:24:45.880 Those which will not lead us into error
00:24:48.360 and those to which we can and must turn
00:24:50.960 in case of doubt as the last court of appeal.
00:24:54.840 I propose to assume instead that no such ideal sources exist.
00:25:00.520 No more than ideal rulers and that all sources
00:25:04.560 are liable to lead us into error at times.
00:25:07.720 And I propose to replace.
00:25:09.360 Therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge
00:25:12.880 by the entirely different question.
00:25:15.320 How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?
00:25:19.760 Knowledge without authority, 1960.
00:25:23.080 Then David goes on.
00:25:24.560 The question, how can we hope to detect and eliminate error
00:25:27.680 is echoed by Feynman Dromark
00:25:29.400 that science is what we have learned
00:25:31.000 about how to keep from filling ourselves.
00:25:33.320 And the answer is basically the same
00:25:35.040 for human decision making as it is for science.
00:25:37.840 It requires a tradition of criticism
00:25:40.000 in which good explanations are sought.
00:25:41.640 For example, explanations of what has gone wrong,
00:25:44.600 what would be better,
00:25:46.040 what effect various policies have had in the past
00:25:48.560 and what would have in the future.
00:25:51.680 But what use are explanations
00:25:53.280 if they cannot make predictions
00:25:54.760 and so cannot be tested through experience
00:25:56.880 as they can be in science?
00:25:58.800 This is really the question.
00:26:00.680 How is progress possible in philosophy?
00:26:03.000 As I discussed in chapter five,
00:26:04.440 it is obtained by seeking good explanations.
00:26:06.920 The misconception that evidence can play no legitimate role
00:26:09.640 in philosophy is a relic of empiricism.
00:26:11.680 Objective progress is indeed possible in politics,
00:26:14.240 just as it is in morality generally and in science.
00:26:17.240 Political philosophy traditionally centered
00:26:19.000 on a collection of issues that pop up called
00:26:20.800 the who should rule question.
00:26:23.600 Who should wield power?
00:26:25.160 Should it be a monarch or aristocrats
00:26:27.360 or priests or a dictator or a small group or the people
00:26:31.160 or their delegates?
00:26:32.640 And that leads to derivative questions
00:26:34.160 such as how should a king be educated?
00:26:36.680 Who should be in franchise into democracy?
00:26:38.920 How does one ensure an informed and responsible electric?
00:26:41.880 Just pause there, of course, there's an article
00:26:46.080 that David and I like to tweet rather regularly
00:26:50.240 when people begin to engage in these questions
00:26:54.920 about who should rule.
00:26:56.000 And it is the article from the economist
00:26:59.440 that pop a wrote about what is democracy?
00:27:02.080 It's about what is democracy.
00:27:04.360 And democracy is about, of course,
00:27:05.640 how to most easily remove rulers without violence
00:27:11.440 rather than how to install certain rulers.
00:27:13.240 But you do hear this today.
00:27:15.200 You hear the certainly in Australia,
00:27:17.800 I know the same discussion goes on the United Kingdom
00:27:20.160 and you hear it from certain people in the United States as well
00:27:24.840 about how we need a more scientifically literate politicians.
00:27:30.040 We need politicians who understand science more.
00:27:32.560 Or we need more scientists in politics.
00:27:36.560 I think, well, again, this is who should rule.
00:27:38.440 The person who should rule should have some sort of scientific
00:27:40.840 understanding and I don't understand that at all.
00:27:45.800 Although one thing, if you listen to the,
00:27:48.240 if you listen to the RSA discussion between Martin Reese
00:27:52.280 and David Deutsch was heartening to here, actually,
00:27:55.200 then both agree and Martin Reese to talk about how
00:28:00.200 he didn't really think it was a great idea
00:28:03.240 for politicians to have a background in science.
00:28:06.920 He would much rather than have a background in, let's say,
00:28:10.720 history and I suppose if I had a bias one way or the other,
00:28:15.120 I'd tend to agree with him on that.
00:28:20.880 Okay, so back to the book.
00:28:23.720 Papa pointed out that this class of questions
00:28:25.920 is rooted in the same misconception as the question,
00:28:28.440 how are scientific theories derived from sensory data,
00:28:31.600 which defines empiricism?
00:28:35.200 It is seeking a system that derives or justifies
00:28:38.000 the right choice of leader or government
00:28:40.120 from an existing idea, such as inherited entitlements,
00:28:43.040 the opinion of the majority.
00:28:44.680 The same misconception also underlies blind optimism
00:28:47.080 and pessimism.
00:28:47.960 They both expect progress to be made by applying a simple rule
00:28:50.880 to existing knowledge to establish which future possibilities
00:28:53.880 to ignore and which to rely on induction, instrumentalism,
00:28:57.520 and even the mark is an all make the same mistake.
00:29:00.000 They expect explanationless progress.
00:29:02.640 They expect knowledge to be created by fear, with few errors
00:29:05.480 and not by a process of variation in selection
00:29:07.920 that is making continual stream of errors and correcting them.
00:29:11.800 The defenders of hereditary monoconym doubted
00:29:14.520 that any method of selection of a leader
00:29:15.960 by means of rational thought and debate
00:29:17.280 could be improved upon.
00:29:18.800 I'm skipping a substantial bit here now,
00:29:22.120 and I'll just point people to, of course, the book
00:29:24.920 and to Popper's important essay in the economist as well.
00:29:30.000 I'll have the link there at the bottom of this video
00:29:33.000 and also put it up on the screen now.
00:29:38.200 But the central point here that David is making
00:29:43.040 and which she's echoing Popper here
00:29:45.320 is that democracy is about trying to avoid violence.
00:29:49.520 It's about this political system of nonviolence.
00:29:52.760 Instead of installing a ruler who is the best,
00:29:56.320 because if the ruler is the best,
00:29:57.720 then they should be kept there by some sort of force.
00:30:03.760 And so the who should rule question is Popper says
00:30:07.080 and the who should rule question really
00:30:08.680 can be traced to a web actor Plato.
00:30:10.640 Bags for violent authoritarian answers
00:30:13.040 and has often received them as David has written there
00:30:16.160 at going Popper.
00:30:18.960 So I'll just read a very small part here
00:30:21.680 where David writes, Popper therefore applies his basic,
00:30:25.040 how can we detect and illuminate errors
00:30:26.680 to political philosophy in the form of
00:30:28.520 how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence?
00:30:32.640 Just as science seeks explanations
00:30:34.520 that are experimentally testable.
00:30:36.000 So a rational political system makes it as easy
00:30:38.520 as possible to detect and persuade others
00:30:40.800 that a leader or policy is bad
00:30:42.480 and to remove them without violence if they are.
00:30:44.680 So there's this real philosophy of nonviolence.
00:30:52.320 It's absolutely crucial.
00:30:53.360 I think to Popper's political philosophy.
00:30:56.680 And I've had some disagreements with people over the years
00:30:58.800 about to what extent Popper believed in coercion.
00:31:02.840 And I don't think he really did,
00:31:04.880 it depends in some senses, he seems to have been
00:31:07.360 a little more socialist and so on.
00:31:09.480 But there's no point arguing.
00:31:13.080 I don't think there's much point arguing about
00:31:16.240 what Popper actually thought I'd rather concentrate
00:31:19.840 on the ideas, the idea being,
00:31:23.040 what is the place of force and coercion in politics, if any?
00:31:28.200 Well, it's remarkable to me how many people seem
00:31:31.160 to think some level of initiating violence
00:31:34.920 is necessary, state violence.
00:31:36.920 But I'm not just talking about violence in response to violence.
00:31:40.200 So if someone else initiates violence,
00:31:41.840 you need some kind of police force to stop that violence
00:31:46.080 or to respond to that violence or some guard
00:31:48.640 or some, you yourself take personal responsibility
00:31:51.960 for responding to that initiation of violence.
00:31:54.920 But there's many, many people who think
00:31:56.160 the state should initiate violence.
00:32:00.360 And should be initiated against people
00:32:02.000 who disagree with the policies of the state.
00:32:05.640 So, you know, for example,
00:32:08.240 I've listened to some professed optimists
00:32:12.320 just to see how optimistic they are on this point.
00:32:15.400 You've got Matthew Ridley, he wrote a book
00:32:17.320 called The Rational Optimist.
00:32:19.440 Stephen Pinker, probably the so-called most prominent,
00:32:25.840 probably the most prominent optimist rivals
00:32:28.800 with David Deutsch has been labeled an optimist.
00:32:31.800 But I don't find either of these people,
00:32:33.800 Matthew Ridley or Stephen Pinker,
00:32:35.320 universally optimists, like the way David Deutsch is.
00:32:39.040 Because both Ridley and Pinker,
00:32:42.000 not to mention everyone else who's not an optimist,
00:32:44.280 okay, which is everyone,
00:32:47.560 they believe in the initiation of force by the state
00:32:50.160 in order to address certain problems.
00:32:51.600 They really do.
00:32:52.440 They're both kind of with Thomas Hobbes.
00:32:55.360 You know, they think there's some kind of inherent evil
00:32:57.640 lurking there in people that needs to be tamed and controlled.
00:33:01.400 Pinker's not a blank slater,
00:33:03.160 it's the norm I, but he, like many other who throw in
00:33:06.000 with the ideas of evolutionary psychology,
00:33:08.280 think that what evolution has written onto our blank slates
00:33:11.760 before birth, really is quite bad in many ways.
00:33:16.360 Not universally bad, not completely bad,
00:33:17.840 but there are some bad aspects to our nature.
00:33:21.120 And so we've got these genes for rape and genes
00:33:25.960 for violence within us.
00:33:29.880 And so even someone like Pinker,
00:33:32.640 you know, the most celebrated of optimist,
00:33:34.720 falls into terrible pessimism about people
00:33:37.600 and what they're going to be compelled to do.
00:33:40.480 It's like they take William Golding's,
00:33:42.400 the Lord of the Flights,
00:33:43.320 if never had a Lord of the Flights,
00:33:44.320 you should read the Lord of the Flights,
00:33:46.200 or at least in the movie.
00:33:47.720 This idea that left to their own devices
00:33:50.640 without state control,
00:33:51.880 without some sort of imposition of power from the top,
00:33:56.080 people will fall into violent anarchy and tyranny
00:33:58.160 because of their genes are compelling into violence.
00:34:00.840 The thing is that every society
00:34:04.320 has always been ruled by violence.
00:34:06.560 It's been kept under control by a certain amount of violence.
00:34:10.160 The status built on this kind of philosophy of violence.
00:34:13.160 It's certainly built on a philosophy of pessimism,
00:34:14.920 not optimism.
00:34:17.480 It should be no surprise that now and again,
00:34:20.480 people do rebel against the state and the controller state.
00:34:24.560 Especially when they feel that the only way to rebel
00:34:26.840 is through violence.
00:34:28.400 So many religions, you know,
00:34:29.560 Christianity probably chief among them,
00:34:33.000 views used people as inherently immoral in some way.
00:34:37.000 They begin immoral and then it's this process
00:34:39.520 of trying to become more moral at a time.
00:34:42.800 It's not just the West,
00:34:44.000 it's not just Christianity here in certain Asian cultures.
00:34:49.280 Historically, there was a kind of a version
00:34:52.160 of Confucianism called Legalism.
00:34:54.040 And it's hard, it saw people as immoral as well.
00:34:57.920 And so the idea there is that you need the strong state
00:35:01.600 in order to control these evil people.
00:35:04.920 Most organisations, most organised religion
00:35:07.560 is kind of based upon this kind of principle.
00:35:10.560 There's something wrong with people inherently.
00:35:15.400 And so they cannot be relied upon
00:35:17.760 to not fall into a complete matter anarchy
00:35:20.240 left to their own devices.
00:35:21.360 We're born tainted, we're born evil, not good.
00:35:25.000 And this is a pessimistic view of what humans are
00:35:28.520 in the potential of humans.
00:35:30.280 So I'm skipping just a small amount here
00:35:33.000 and then David Wright's.
00:35:34.720 Thus, systems of government had to be judged,
00:35:36.840 not for their prophetic ability to choose
00:35:39.000 and install good leaders and policies,
00:35:41.080 but for their ability to remove bad ones
00:35:43.800 that are already there.
00:35:45.920 That entire stance is fallibleism in action.
00:35:48.680 It assumes that rulers and policies
00:35:50.560 are always going to be flawed,
00:35:52.560 that problems are inevitable.
00:35:54.280 But it also assumes that improving upon them is possible.
00:35:57.800 Problems are soluble.
00:35:59.600 The ideal towards which this is working
00:36:02.080 is not that nothing unexpected will go wrong,
00:36:05.160 but that when it does, it will be an opportunity
00:36:07.640 for further progress.
00:36:09.280 Okay, I'm going to pause there.
00:36:10.680 That's the end of this part
00:36:13.040 and yet there's still much more to read and to comment upon.
00:36:18.040 Thank you, everyone.