Due to the many mediums through which people express themselves today, there's no clear starting point into an interesting person's worldview, or their most meaningful work.
We curate that which matters most from their expressions.
What’s shared here is reflective of events & interests pre 2020. As we know, much has changed since.
Quick Tip
Embracing Contradictory Ideas
We have to embrace the inconsistency of our own minds, not as a bug, but as a feature, that we are in essence, brought here by the forces of selection. We are the products of systems of selective pressures, and what they seem to do is, to create the ability to run many many different programs, and often contradictory programs within the same mind.
The question is why have we put such an extraordinary emphasis on intellectual consistency, so that we are constantly alerted to the hypocrisy of others, but we are seemingly blind to it in ourselves.
Our mind is constructed with an architecture that allows us to run various sandboxes, where we can experiment with the ideas of others without actually becoming the other. Can we run another mind in emulation, perhaps not as well as its original owner?
But can we run that mind well enough to understand it, to empathize with it, and to argue and spar with it, to achieve some kind of better outcome, where we are actually able to turn foes into dancing partners, as we come to show that we’ve actually understood perspectives different from our own.
The biggest objection to this way of thinking is that it’s somehow a kind of a cheat that hypocrisy is being summoned by another name. But I think this is actually incorrect. I think that we have these sandboxes, for example, so that we can fight more effectively a foe, that we feel we must defeat.
So for example: recently I talked about the importance of being able to run a Jihadi sandbox in our minds, if we want to understand the forces that are behind Islamic terror, and its effect, on what I think are relatively fragile western sensibilities about life and death.
And so if we choose not to empathize with the other, to say, that so much as beyond the pale, we are probably not going to be very effective in understanding that the other does not see itself as evil. It does not see itself as an enemy that must be fought. I don’t necessarily need to agree with it, but to demonstrate that I can’t even run the program, simply for the purpose of social signaling seems the height of folly.
How do we hope to become effective if we can’t guess what the other will do next?
There are limits to this, we have to have a certain kind of consistency of mind. But the idea that you can’t be capable of running a die-hard rationalist materialist atheist program, as well as a program that says perhaps I will open myself to transcendental states. And if I need to anthropomorphize those as coming from a deity.. perhaps the idea is that that architecture is not what a Richard Dawkins would suggest: as a kind of mind virus, but in fact, it’s a facility that we choose to deny ourselves at our peril.
What if we’re trapped on a local maximum of fitness, and in fact, we need to get to higher ground. But the idea is that the traversal of the so-called adaptive Valley, where we have to make things much much worse, before they get much better. What if the idea is that cannot generally be attempted rationally.. that we need a modicum of faith, a belief, that we cannot reference to any sort of information set. We could end up trapped on local maxima forever.
But I think it’s really important to consider that some people may be able to traverse the adaptive valley without belief in a deity — some may need a temporary belief in a deity; some may be able to reference some sort of a transcendental state, and steal ourselves, in order to make the journey.
But however it is accomplished, there are times, when it would appear that all hope is lost, and that if we are not to end our days stuck on these local maximum, whatever we have achieved, that we have to fundamentally experiment with ways of thinking, if only temporarily, to get us to higher ground.
On Excellence
I think that very few people see the words excellence or consensus as anything other than the most positive words. These are the habits that most people seek to cultivate; they wish to be part of the consensus; they wish to be excellent in both their behavior and hope for excellent outcomes. I think the problem is that we didn’t realize that excellence, so far as it goes, is fine, but it’s involved in a trade-off — and that trade-off has to do with the fact that excellence is really about quality control.
How quality control in the pursuit of excellence can be deadly, music. It’s about the fact that if I’m going to go for, let’s say, a classical music concert I want to assume that the piece will be played flawlessly, and I will concentrate only on the interpretive aspects of the piece above that.
But in fact quality control can be deadly. For example in a jazz day where an improviser takes few risks, the music may be pleasant enough as background music, but it’s scarcely the sort of thing that would have animated the bebop generation, who played live dates under open mic conditions never knowing what would happen next.
Perhaps the most famous jazz album of all time was Miles Davis Kind of Blue, and if you look at the sheet music for that day almost nothing was written down. It was just a question of bringing the most amazing minds together, and you can even hear a few flaws on that album, which make it so exciting. So I think that the problem is, is that we have to realize that excellence is about hill climbing. It’s about the fabled 10000 hours. It’s about practice making perfect, and this is something that to the credit of excellence, is something we do know how to teach.
Perhaps we don’t know how to teach everyone how to achieve it, but there’s always a class of people who through dedicated repetition, will be able to bring their variance under extraordinary pressure, so that they are reliable members of our society. We want this in our surgeon’s often; we want this and our musical classical music performers. But the question is do we want it everywhere? And because we do know how to teach excellence, we’ve blinded ourselves to the role that a different thought process is involved, and which, I would associate with genius.
I think many of us particularly in the West led by business have embraced their model of excellence in education without proper regard for its costs. In an essay I recently wrote for the edge.org website I tried to point out that excellence is really a low variance strategy.
What is the highest mean output you can produce without much variation in your output? That’s a very different question than, what is the highest expected value an innovator can produce if we’re willing to tolerate a great deal of failure?
In the Silicon Valley model, let’s say, and some of the research universities either in the US in places like Britain which use eccentricity to punch above their weight or, even paradoxically in the old Soviet Union where freedom was tolerated among mathematicians and physicists, provided they were good enough.
I think that what happened is that people became tolerant of huge levels of variation and that those individuals have produced entire fields that provide jobs and provide research problems on a going-forward basis So it’s very important not to think that reducing the variance in output can be done for free.
So genius and excellence are both worthwhile but they are distinct modalities, and not recognizing that it is a serious problem to take somebody in the genius idiom and to push them into a different idiom, which is to reduce their variance, is going to be very destructive and it’s going to keep us from founding the industries that will allow us to change paradigms and move forward.
On Genius & High Agency
So the entire culture of credentialism of professionalism is really a culture of excellence. But in fact society is run by power laws. The very thick tails of these distributions suggests that life isn’t normally distributed, but distributed by power laws, and we need a special class of people to play those tails, to get us the returns, to power us forward in advanced society.
And so what I’m really interested in is not being blinded by excellence to the prospects, for other modalities — in particular genius.
The key question is, who are these high variance individuals? Why are our schools filled with dyslexics? Why are there so many kids diagnosed with A.D.H.D? My claim is these are giant and underserved populations who are not meant for the excellence model. They are meant to be the innovators – the people who bring us new forms of music that others will seek to perfect at home in their performance.
You’re looking for an education which makes students unteachable by standard methods, and this is where we get into the trouble. Which is we don’t talk about teaching disabilities, we talk about learning disabilities. A lot of the kids that I want are kids who have been labeled learning disabled, but they’re actually super learners. They’re like learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower. And when teachers can’t deal with this we label those kids ‘learning disabled’ to cover up from the fact that the economics of teaching require that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep. Well that’s not a good model.
On the learning disabled
Those of you who’ve been told that you’re learning disabled, or you’re not good at math, or that you’re terrible at music or something like that, seek out unconventional ways of proving that wrong. Believe not only in yourselves, but that there are structures that are powerful enough to make things that look very difficult much easier than you ever imagined.
These are the sorts of people who bring us new scientific vistas who explore new terrain. And what we’ve done is we’ve created a system which effectively demonizes these different patterns. We even call these things learning disabilities, when in fact if you look at the learning disabled population they very often are the most intellectual accomplished members of society. But we put them through a torture chamber of K through 12 education, where we attempt to convince the teachers, who have no idea how to serve this population. We tried to make sure that there is no indication that there are teaching disabilities, by pushing the responsibility onto the students.
These are the people who are going to create the new multi-billion dollar industries, and in fact, the problem is that we don’t realize the genius is really about adaptive Valley crossing. It’s about taking on risk taking on cost doing things that make almost no sense to anyone else, and can only be shown to have been sensible after the fact, because in fact, and I think you know Jim Watson said this beautifully.. He said if you’re really going to do anything big you’re by definition unqualified to do it.
High agency
High agency is … well, are you constantly… when you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something.
So, how am I gonna get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience. You’re constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyver-ish sort of a way, and that’s your approach to the world.
I think (MacGyver on steroids) heralds a return, at least among Americans, to our previous way of being. I think there was some terrible thing that happened starting around 1970 and that is just cracking now. So, really, about 45 years of a low agency super-safe, timid, frightened kind of societal aspiration. If you just stay on track can we keep the American prosperity machine going. I think we now realize that you can’t do it without a bunch of really marginal characters – people who have might be described as disruptive have bad attitudes – these are my people. They’re tough to deal with and I don’t always and enjoy them but I do think that without them it’s not much of a football team.
There are high agency people everywhere. What there isn’t necessarily is critical mass. Sometimes I refer to the Bay Area is the innovation ghetto so you have all of the people who are too high agency to behave properly and wait their turn and the rest of the country. So they’ve been given like the nicest piece of real estate an un-godly amount of cash and the pleasure of each other’s company.
But they’ve been told ‘Okay, you have to stay at the terms of your probation, so you have to stay within the Bay area’ So what I’d love to see is, I’d love to see more of us violating our parole and going into the rest of the country and trying to bring that irreverent spirit.
So I think it’s really important to start respecting our marginal citizens of greatest ability and looking for the unusual personality types that are irreverent and committed enough to making things happen and to really do things.
Build a culture for genius
R Buckminster Fuller “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses us”.
Believe in the concept and see whether or not I think we have the opportunity to educate the genius or whether respect is becoming a necessity with the rise of automation of power of unity.
Everyone has something in them that’s capable of making wild leaps, many of which are insightful if you’ve ever been around children you’ll notice this power is spooky strong early in life.
If genius is something prosaic and analytic and definable, it means we are even frightened of considering this.
Do we have a vibrant educational system or is it mostly trained on privileged presentation?
Why are we so highly conserved if it didn’t have an extraordinary function?
On Self Teaching & KungFu Panda
What I realized was that it was the only film that I’d ever seen that struggled with the issue that I felt almost defines my quest, which is : Why can’t a self teacher leave pupils?
If there was some way for a Newton to leave in Newton, dependably, the world would be a completely different place.
So my claim was that the original innovator in the film is a turtle which is an even more inappropriate kung fu archetype than a panda, because they’re obviously slow-moving. And the turtle works out the secrets of harmony and focus at the pool of sacred tears. But when the kingdom is threatened by a kung fu student of great ability who’s gone wrong all, that the kingdom can muster is the usual of over trained students. So think aspirants to Princeton and Stanford and Harvard. And so these are all the kids who get like perfect SATs and have amazing extracurricular activities. But fundamentally, what we don’t realize is that they’ve all been rendered incomplete in a way because they can’t tap into the self teaching modality, because they have been so thoroughly over taught.
So the turtle recognizes that the Panda is the only one who can save the day and all the turtle has to go on in choosing a successor is that the Panda has innovated one silly thing, which is to turn a fireworks cart into a makeshift rocket to jump a wall. So from this humble beginning the magic unfolds, and it’s really about the magic of how one self teacher leaves a successor and solves the problem.
I think where I’m headed with this is that most of us who wind up using these sort of strange high agency hacks to negotiate the world, have some kind of a traumatic birth. We may flatter ourselves that were in touch with reality, but in fact, reality is a second best strategy.
If you’re lucky your family works pretty well and you never leave social reality. It’s only when something goes wrong that you discover, okay, the world doesn’t work in any way the way I was told. Here’s the underlying structure. What you then have to realize is, if you want to do this at scale, you’ve got to stop relying on these traumatic births it’s like you’re waiting for somebody to get bit by a spider to become spider-man. No you have to do this as a more controlled fashion.
So I think what we need to do is we need to create a completely secondary parallel educational structure for people who are going to be in the high agency creativity discovery idiom and realize that we know how to impart expertise, but we don’t know how to impart creativity in genius.
If we teach self-teachers, does our teaching, crowd out their self-teaching? It’s because it’s about one self teacher who passes it on to another. Einstein left us no school. His genius died with him.
What if these great people are able to teach us how they self taught?… Once when the panda breaks into a kung-fu competition, showing active improvisation. And the turtle appears to choose the panda who’s clearly inappropriate simply based on the fact that they did something original, unlike the highly trained competitors. The second time the panda is mostly ### that he’s failing relative to the highly trained competitors. The turtle shows no interest in this problem what so ever.
High Agency Explanation
High agency is … well, are you constantly… when you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something.
So, how am I gonna get past this bouncer who told me that I can’t come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience. You’re constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyver-ish sort of a way, and that’s your approach to the world.
I think (MacGyver on steroids) heralds a return, at least among Americans, to our previous way of being. I think there was some terrible thing that happened starting around 1970 and that is just cracking now. So, really, about 45 years of a low agency super-safe, timid, frightened kind of societal aspiration. If you just stay on track can we keep the American prosperity machine going. I think we now realize that you can’t do it without a bunch of really marginal characters – people who have might be described as disruptive have bad attitudes – these are my people. They’re tough to deal with and I don’t always and enjoy them but I do think that without them it’s not much of a football team.
There are high agency people everywhere. What there isn’t necessarily is critical mass. Sometimes I refer to the Bay Area is the innovation ghetto so you have all of the people who are too high agency to behave properly and wait their turn and the rest of the country. So they’ve been given like the nicest piece of real estate an un-godly amount of cash and you know the pleasure of each other’s company.
But they’ve been told ‘Okay, you have to stay at the terms of your probation, so you have to stay within the Bay area’ So what I’d love to see is, I’d love to see more of us violating our parole and going into the rest of the country and trying to bring that irreverent spirit.
So I think it’s really important to start respecting our marginal citizens of greatest ability and looking for the unusual personality types that are irreverent and committed enough to making things happen and to really do things.
Build a culture for genius
Buckminster Fuller “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses us”.
Believe in the concept and see whether or not I think we have the opportunity to educate the genius or whether respect is becoming a necessity with the rise of automation of power of unity.
Everyone has something in them that’s capable of making wild leaps, many of which are insightful if you’ve ever been around children you’ll notice this power is spooky strong early in life.
If genius is something prosaic and analytic and definable, it means we are even frightened of considering this.
Do we have a vibrant educational system or is it mostly trained on privileged presentation?
Why are we so highly conserved if it didn’t have an extraordinary function?
Umbrellas, Innovation, Ideas
So, I don’t know how to solve the problem of the umbrella. There’s nothing I like about umbrellas. They blow up in wind so that they’re easily wrecked under the conditions that in which they’re supposed to be used, they have these long metal spikes at about eye level, so they’re clearly a safety hazard.
Everything about the umbrella strikes me as wrong. I’ve seen people try to innovate in the umbrella situation there are ones that have air blowers that blow the water away from you there are funky folding designs. But I am almost positive that there exists some very simple mechanical design that would improve the umbrella.
On the other hand, I don’t have that same confidence about the coffee mug. Yes, you could put some electronics in it. You can make it smarter than it is. But fundamentally it seems to be in such a simple stay, that I wouldn’t think that I should innovate there.
What I hate about those problems is if the if there are answers in the back of the book it’s not a good problem. It has to be an actual problem that the asker doesn’t know.
So if I can give the example where there is a solution known. Luggage before 1989, so it turns out that nobody really knew how to do wheeled luggage before 1989. It was just mind-blowing. It’s hard to imagine that like the whole world had their heads wedged so far up there, that they couldn’t think to put in these large recessed wheels with a telescoping handle.
This was the invention of a guy named Robert Plath, who was a pilot for Northwest, I think. In one fell swoop he convinced everyone that their old luggage was terrible. So even though there wasn’t a lot of growth, he created the growth because nobody wanted their old luggage.
You could compare these discrete brainwave innovations across field. So for example, in table tennis in the early 50s, the worst player on the Japanese team at the Bombay Table Tennis Championships was this guy Hiroji Satoh. He glued two foam expanses to both sides of a sandpaper table tennis bat and nobody could cue off of the sounds, because it changed the sound of the ball. It’s like if you put a suppressor on your paddle.
The the idea that the worst player on one of the lower rated teams would be the undisputed champion simply through an innovation that was that profound, shows you what the power of one of these ideas, is that the power laws are just so unbelievably in your favor if you win, that it makes it worthwhile.
On umbrellas and real problems
What I hate about those problems is if the if there are answers in the back of the book it’s not a good problem. It has to be an actual problem that the asker doesn’t know.
So, I don’t know how to solve the problem of the umbrella. There’s nothing I like about umbrellas. They have (Tim laughs) No, seriously Tim, they blow up in wind so that they’re easily wrecked under the conditions that in which they’re supposed to be used, they have these long metal spikes at about eye level, so they’re clearly a safety hazard.Everything about the umbrella strikes me as wrong. I’ve seen people try to innovate in the umbrella situation there are ones that have air blowers that blow the water away from you there are funky folding designs. But I am almost positive that there exists some very simple mechanical design that would improve the umbrella.
The power of one of these ideas, is that the power laws are just so unbelievably in your favor if you win, that it makes it worthwhile.
..in science I try to use various intellectual arbitrage techniques where if you have a bunch of smart people who have been focused on a problem, I try to look at what as a group their weaknesses are.
How is the their bread buttered? What is it that they can’t afford to say or think? For example in theoretical physics there all sorts of shibboleths where if you can’t say that you believe that quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic, you’re not a member of the club, because it’s assumed that you sort of can’t accept a difficult reality. Or if you can’t sign up for one of the major schools, you have no way to get funding because there’s no one who will support your grant applications.
So you start to look at what causes, what should be a diverse portfolio of ideas, to collapse in terms of the diversity where everybody starts representing the same point of view with tiny variations. If you’re looking at a problem that’s never been attempted, you don’t want to use intellectual arbitrage because it’s just blue sky. There’s no reason that the first attempts to think through the problem won’t yield fruit.
But you know in the case of the umbrella, what made one think that this was a problematic object? So count the number of moving parts. Then in general, as things reach final form they they tend to get radically simple. So there’s too many moving parts, if there’s some innovation that’s happened since the problem was originally considered.
So for example in the case of Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality maybe. Virtual Reality was considered years before Oculus, but nobody had rethought it in the presence of economies of scale that bring the screens and smartphones down in price. So suddenly you have the high quality screens that are affordable that way back when would have cost prohibitive amount. So ask yourself what’s changed recently? Where is the object that currently inhabits the space violating some sort of aspect of canonical design?
On techno-optimism-pessimism, genius, heroism, carbon based value. So I think in fact is what we combine the techno optimism because we’ve seen amazing things work here with techno-pessimism, because we’ve seen busts and we’ve seen people loose money. In fact we’re converging on a kind of techno-realism. We’re going from Silicon Valley. It doesn’t have to be Silicon Valley based. You can easily take the same kind of belief in genius and heroism and make it a carbon based value as well. So I think this is extremely exciting.
Technology giving back to the elder sibling, Science – QuoteSlide on board: “Technology as the younger sibling to science appears to be giving back to an elder who lost the faith with her earlier genius and heroism amidst a culture of accountability and extreme financial pressures”
On Zero to One
I had met Peter when I had been sort of living in New York and playing in the Bay area a little bit with the tech crowd and I was told by some friends you have to come out for this crazy ‘Being Human’ conference. And so, any conference name ‘Being Human’ seemed too Californian to be a good idea, but I was forced into coming out.
And there was a sort of a circle of people which Peter was in and I was in, talking about what it what it means to really look at the human condition from a rational, but also open-hearted perspective. Peter and I started talking and I told him that I was thinking that I might have a theory of everything that I should debut, and I think he probably thought, you know, haircut, the possibility that what I was saying was true. But then I was invited to give these lectures at Oxford. The Simonyi special lectures.
Charles Simonyi, I think he was like the original engineer at Microsoft and and he had endowed a professorship at Oxford where which is held now by Marcos du Sautoy, after Richard Dawkins held it, which has some lectures attached.
I was invited to give lectures under this program. I was giving technical talks, but a story or two came out about how a potential theory of everything was being debuted. I guess Peter probably saw that.
He invited me to a quiet conference he was holding in the South of France, and shortly afterwards he invited me to a breakfast after that, and at the breakfast, I think I was midway through some breakfast sausage, and he just blurts out, he says “You have to leave New York” I didn’t understand why, and I said “Really, and go where?”. He says “You could come here”. And I said “And do what?”. And he said “You could work for me”.
So, I didn’t know whether he was like suffering from too much sleep, but it turned out he was quite serious. And it’s been one of the most rewarding intellectual relationships of my life. He’s just a stunning, sparkling mind, and somebody who has not only the courage of his convictions, but has been right so many times and over enough things that he has had the freedom to break with all tradition when he thinks the world is wrong, and one or two people may have it right. which is that’s exactly my cup of tea.
Peter is just a stunning, sparkling mind, and somebody who has not only the courage of his convictions, but has been right so many times and over enough things that he has had the freedom to break with all tradition when he thinks the world is wrong, and one or two people may have it right. which is that’s exactly my cup of tea. The first issue is that, it’s so difficult to think for yourself. I mean, I find it very difficult to think for myself. I have all sorts of ideas in my head that aren’t mine I’m subjected to all sorts of pressures I find difficult to resist.
I think Peters looking for the tiny universe of people who are attempting to think things through from First Principles, and as it’s become very tough because socially constructed reality is so much a part of our lives. So I think first his feeling would be find the people who are capable of seeing something really new and then figure out what to do with them later.
On Zero to One
I think the problem is the average person has never had an idea, a really powerful personal idea. So most people don’t have a single secret. And so the real reason most people shouldn’t start a company is that they don’t know or believe anything that the rest of the world knows or thinks of as being nonsense. And so this is the engine behind the book.
What’s disturbing is to watch people reading this book, not realizing that it’s the whole thing is predicated on the idea that you must have a secret. Try to imagine somebody building a car with no engine, it doesn’t really matter how nice you get the upholstery it’s not going to work.
I think that in part this is why it’s so difficult coming back to the sort of kung-fu panda pedagogy question. Assumed that I hit one or two of these secrets and I am successful at them. It doesn’t have to be in business, it could be in science, it could be in literature, anywhere. The problem is, you want to lead someone through the process of succeeding at something and seeing what blocked the path.
Idea of a Creator
I’m in the very unusual position of being a PhD who did not really have an advisor. And I think that I learned a lot of what I needed to learn from very old texts relative to the speed at which people published. So Einstein, in his writings, I found an incredible source of inspiration and I watched very carefully how he talked about the Creator.
And the Creator stood in, if you will, for order that he presumed to be present, but could not yet prove. His debate with quantum about quantum mechanics wasn’t that he didn’t accept it but he didn’t accept it as bedrock the way perhaps someone like Bohr would have advanced to use it as a Shibboleth to separate those who could really do physics and those who just couldn’t accept things being really, really weird.
I think we have a very desperate situation in physics at the moment, which not all physicists will will admit, which is that we have more or less three or four equations that represent our top level, their bottom level understanding universe. In some sense, at least three of the four of them seem to be best possible in their categories, so we’re sort of it feels like we’re kind of at the end.
Nobody believes that we would be in this situation so to even work on this problem. It’s kind of intellectual suicide. We’ve gone for almost 40 years without an improvement validated by nature coming from theory in the standard model of physics. General relativity has said mostly inert since it was put in relatively final form around 1915 into the into the early 20s.
So why should you go into this? Why should you trade a career in management consulting or hedge funderie for almost certain doom. I think it requires something of a religious spirit to play with the outcomes on the thick right tail of a power-law of human existence where most most likely you’re going to fail. You’re going to lose. It’s the sort of maximum likelihood.
But the thick right tail is called us and speaks to our ability to improve the species and to increase our understanding of the cosmos. I would not be able to think about these things so easily if I couldn’t posit some version of the Creator, because I can’t solve the I can’t solve the question of why is there something rather than nothing?
My attempt is to say assuming that there’s calculus and linear algebra and nothing else how close can I get to four-dimensional space-time with three generations of fermions and the observed forces. Is there any way to get that out of emergence? It’s a very tall order and so it was almost certainly an insane thing to start a project like that for me.
But in my experience I would go into a closet in my mind and I would attempt to speak to this thing that could not speak. Einstein asked this one question which moved me where he said ‘I don’t care about the spectrum of this or that element. What really concerns me is whether the Creator had any choice.’
And that was really my research problem, which is: Is the Creator not all-powerful, all-knowing, but in fact all constrained a custodian whose only job is to switch on the light of reality? Trying to think about John Wheelers concept of the universe examining itself.
I view us, in some sense, as the emergent artificial intelligence which will animate the Creator when we turn in the source code, where the universe for the first time, uses us as its artificial intelligence to contemplate its own reality, which it’s never been able to do, at least in our little neighborhood.
So the question is, can you have a system self contemplates? Does that actually animate the Creator? Are we supposed to bring the Creator to some sentient perspective?
Now that sounds insane on some level. It doesn’t sound of a piece with here’s the Lagrangian, here are the equations, this differential operator over here
.…
Because it really matters to me if I’m going to go into a very deep state of thought to think that I am in some sense consulting the Creator and that my job is to listen, and to think that somehow this is all going to work out. I think that what I found is that this is how a subset of people who are quite rational behave.
…
But the particular area of physics that I care most about, I use a faith module for intermediate steps in trying to figure out how to proceed. Because, our brains may be constructed for thinking about people, sometimes it helps to imagine nature as a Creator and to be in conversation with the Creator.
And so the anthropomorphizing of design constraints, as a Creator, can be extremely liberating. It allows you to hand wave and to sort of black box certain things that if you were in a sort of rigorous framework, you’d be trapped on a local maximum, and you could never cross the Adaptive landscape. And the Adaptive Valley is to borrow from the evolutionary theory of civil right.
…
I think that L Ron Hubbard was interested in doing other terrestrial things and Elon is actually interested not in playing in religion. But just the way you guys have made this very interesting point that the great atheist governmental experiment that ended in so many deaths in the 20th century were actually religious in some way, which i think is an interesting point. I don’t quite get the same good feeling from that that you do, but it certainly needs to be entertained.
I think that there is something religious about this kind of faith. I don’t know him, I’ve never met him, but I do think that it is emblematic of the mindset that I would say would be permeable to faith and the speed with which he picked up on AI and this sort of artificial general intelligence apocalypse suggests that that mind is also permeable to things that are at least in the general neighborhood of faith.
Because the idea of building a golem that could in fact destroy you. There’s a very religious aspect to this singular act of violence creation.
Changing Beliefs
So I think of myself as an atheist, but it’s only because there’s a room in my mind that I try to keep very very clean and analytical that I sort of make the first among equals. But I have needs for these other things.
There are times where the truth doesn’t give me enough meaning and I’ll start storytelling. Like, we’re surrounded, we’ve got to fight our way out, and all that kind of narrative, ..
On Fiction and its role within Truth
So my four things that I care about are truth, fitness, meaning and grace. All of those trade off among each other. I think I said something like this on Sam Harris’s program a lot of the people who wrote in said ‘Oh it shows that he doesn’t care about truth’. And I felt like, no it just shows that you guys just don’t understand.
Sam would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. So if you’ve had a DMT or an LSD experience that can give you meaning and transcendence.
If you can think your way more accurately through a problem, that should increase your fitness. Maybe grace is something that’s independent and you have to figure out whether that’s something that’s important to you, but that’s a choice, an elected objective. And my belief is that a lot of these things are preset, and there’s actually more antagonism between them.
So I think of myself as an atheist, but it’s only because there’s a room in my mind that I try to keep very very clean and analytical that I sort of make the first among equals. But I have needs for these other things.
When I go full Atheist in that compartment of my mind, I often have some trouble recovering as much meaning as I’d like. I can do more than the religious think that I can do, but there are some problems about repeated games with boundary conditions and reasons for heaven and hell are not necessarily stupid, even if they don’t exist.
There are times where the truth doesn’t give me enough meaning and I’ll start storytelling. Like, we’re surrounded, we’ve got to fight our way out, and all that kind of narrative.
I do think there’s a very interesting interplay between rationality and faith between truth and fiction.
I think once I remember hearing somebody ask John Updike: Why is it that you write fiction why don’t you write about the truth? and he said something like “My good man, what is it you think great fiction is?” To him, it was hyper Truth.
There are several things I care about other than truth and one of them is Fitness in the sort of sense of natural and sexual selection. I think that fitness is something which Dawkins has really wrong and the best version of this would probably be something coming for my brother, Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary theorist.
But I’ll give my version of his perspective, or sometimes our shared perspective, which is that it can’t be the case that religion is a virus in some sense of the mind. It’s clearly part of fitness because it’s just too expensive in most cases that it would be driven out.
So when you have these mysterious things that are not obviously positive that seem to carry a burden for their host, in general they have to be delivering some kind of a benefit because it would be easy to excise them. And so because Dawkins seems to view this as this is a tax on Fitness.
So I think it’s very important to think about theater, to think about fiction and its role within Truth. You have to you have to decamp from normal reality, where you start thinking about everything in positive terms. Well how am I negatively going to impact my neighbor. No, this is your time, you’re stealing your time.
The act of creation is itself is a violent action.
An essay that changed his life
The most interesting thing about it is that it carries a publication date in the New York Times in 1944 and what it is a discussion of is the Holocaust before the world is ready to hear that it is going on. There is in particular a paragraph talks about what it is like to hold this position in a hostile universe which doesn’t wish to believe this because of various state interests.
Article mentioned in this podcast: A. Koestler. “The Nightmare That Is a Reality.” The New York Times Magazine. January 9, 1944.
“As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the Troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps. They don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France and the mass graves of Poland. They have never heard of Lidice Treblinka or Belzec. You can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves. Their mental self defense begins to work, and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.
Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world, so perhaps it is the other way round.
Perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screen fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so? This war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your daydreaming eyes would still be alive.”
Archetypes and Jordan Peterson
JOE: It's fascinating to me how many different idea ideologies exist and how much they vary and how people can just slot right into those and accept them as the end-all be-all period. To me just from an evolutionary psychology standpoint just looking at the the broad spectrum of ideologies that people slot into, it's so fascinating. It's so fascinating how many different mindsets that people adhere to that are unwavering and rigid and how common it is. It's so uncommon to not have an ideology.
I mean, it seems like this idea of, well the numbers that we have of atheists and agnostics in America today I mean is this unprecedented? Is this the most the largest group of human beings ever that are looking at things and going maybe nobody has the answer? Maybe this isn't the right way?
ERIC: Yeah. Well, but I also think that a lot of those agnostics and atheists have more religious leanings than they open up to, and a lot more of the religious folks are able to run the atheist agnostic program almost perfectly between their ears as well. I don't think it's as clean as let's say Sam Harris might make it.
JOE: I was going to get to next why is it that so many people who are atheists and agnostics adopt religious tendencies in terms of cultural behavior and what they're willing to accept and not willing to except. A lot of the stuff that you see that you were calling earlier when you were saying people that describe racism and you know describe it as power and influence, these cult member ideas. You're a lot of times getting these cult member ideas from people that will tell you that they're not a part of an ideology, they're not religious, but they're exhibiting dogmatic religious ideology. So that was my question is is it just a thing that we are inherently programmed to slot into?
ERIC: Yeah. This is this is the big point where when Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris got into it the first time on Sam's show -
JOE: That was so confusing.
ERIC: Well was confusing and Sam would have would have appeared to have won that one pretty decisively because Jordan tried to fold in fitness to the definition of truth which does not work right. Jordan's point however was really deep and I don't think he did it the service it needed to be to have done.
JOE: I think it would have been better off in person. I don't like conversations where people are talking on Skype and -
ERIC: This is why I've refused so far to do any podcast where I'm not looking at the person because I believe that the eye contact, the warmth, it's huge.
JOE: It's huge. I've done one so far that was with John Anthony West, the brilliant Egyptologist, just because he was ill and he lives in New York and it's just hard, and it was awkward.
ERIC: Yeah I do it if I had to, but in general it's like how many fights have happened over Unicode text.
JOE: The message board fights. How many them it would even take place are you looking at each other talking to each other tone social cues is it completely -
ERIC: Tone. It's like with video conferencing is is that you find that you're staring right above the person's eyes so there's no trust.
JOE: Yeah it's weird.
ERIC: But what I was gonna say is that Jordan Peterson's really deep point yes if I understand it - so Jordan if you're out there please correct me - is only archetype of the kind found in religion is sufficiently rich and deep to explain why humans behave the way they do. There's no scientific theory that's good enough, there's no purely logical, there's no clearly philosophical tradition. So as of the moment we are stuck with deep cultural archetype - maybe Shakespeare would be the only thing comparable to the religious canons.
And the claim that you're making implicitly and the Jordan is making perhaps more explicitly is that there's something about our brains - maybe that we were parented and so we need to give the parenting apparatus over to something else, I don't know - that fundamentally finds its way to religion, even if the computer that is our brain knows that it's making leaps that don't make sense.
Capitalism 2.0, UBI
On Technology killing Capitalism
Interview with Pia Malaney
PIA: I’m going to start by reading your quote from a recent essay that you wrote. “Capitalism and Communism which briefly resembled victor and vanquished, increasingly look more like Thelma and Louise; a tragic couple sent over the edge by forces beyond their control. What comes next is anyone’s guess and the world hangs in the balance.”
Do you really think market capitalism is dead?
ERIC: I can’t say that I started out thinking that market capitalism is dead, but I think I’ve been reluctantly pushed towards that conclusion. I think so many of the recent reports on our economy, with tech firms sitting on huge cash war chests, buybacks, recoveries without much progress in terms of wages, the middle class continually losing ground, young people unable to start families, and the propensity for first home purchases decreasing, have led me to question whether we have a million little fires that need to be put out, or some sort of central explanation.
And I think that actually the world makes a lot more sense, if we think the unthinkable, which is that market capitalism was in fact an accident of the 20th century, and that there are certain preconditions that need to be present for it to function, which, we may have actually changed these conditions through technology, not through Rebel ideologies, so that well, market capitalism has always focused on totalitarian communism as its intellectual foe and dancing partner.. In fact, it was its child – technology that may have actually done it in.
PIA: So you believe it’s really technology that is killing capitalism? In what way do you think this is happening?
ERIC: So this is really interesting. I think that there are probably a variety of ways in which this is happening. On the one hand, software which is I think best understood by the people who code it, really excels at looped behavior – so whether it’s a for loop or a while loop, if you stop a computer program at random, it could stop either in the Rube Goldberg like sections, which unfold, once never to be repeated, or in the parts that continue to repeat the same behavior. And in fact almost always it will end up in a loop. Because that’s where the power of software comes from, and that’s where software spends most of its time.
A lot of our training in fact almost all of the training that we know how to do repeat-ably, like in medicine or law or accounting, is predicated on the idea of expertise, that we should teach people through a one time major investment in their education, with a small amount of continuing education to keep them current, that they should do some looped repetitive pattern, in the pursuit of expertise in a field, in order to feed themselves and their families.
And I think that the problem is that our educational system has maneuvered them into the crosshairs of software, so that they are in fact training to do what software does best, and if you imagine for example a radiologist who’s trained for many years in order to be able to make tricky diagnoses, potentially being obviated by a deep learning algorithm, and you’ll have a tiny number of radiologists at the top of the profession for the very tricky cases. But most of the work will be handled by a machine. This leads us to a very uncomfortable paradigm.
I think the reason that few of us are talking about the death of capitalism is that we don’t want to leave the shore that we know, until we know there’s some landmass that we can swim to. And there is as yet no ‘ism’ not communism, not socialism, not capitalism, that I see is capable of taking over the management of these complex emergent systems that we see in our cities and in our economies.
On Universal Basic Income
So I think it’s really important to understand that where we are is that we may need a hybrid model in the future which is paradoxically more capitalistic than our capitalism of today and perhaps even more socialistic than our communism of yesteryear, because so many souls will require respect and hope and freedom and choice who may not be able to defend themselves in the market as our machines and our software gets better and better.
And this is one of the reasons why something like universal basic income comes out of a place fiercely capitalistic like Silicon Valley, because despite the fact that many view the technologists mercenary megalomaniacs, in fact, these are the folks who are closest to seeing the destruction that their work may visit upon the population.
And I don’t know, I think, of any 9, 10, or 11-figure individual at the moment that I’m familiar with who isn’t worrying about what we’re going to do to take care of those who may not be able to meet their expectations with training and jobs as in previous models. Truck and car driving is one of the largest employers of working-age men threatened by self-driving vehicles or any of the other examples.
For example: computers that are capable of writing sports stories from the scores alone. So in all of these cases I think the technology is actually forcing those who are most familiar with it to become most compassionate. And whether or not we are going to leaven our capitalism with some communism or start from some sort of socialist ideal and realize that if we don’t find a way to grow our pie very aggressively with the tiny number of individuals who are capable of taking over operations of great complexity, I think that we are going to have some kind of a hybrid system. I wish I could tell you what it was going to look like but the fact is nobody knows.
Universal basic income is very interesting but is clearly a first step and I would say really a first draft of a part of a theory that we just don’t have yet. Honestly I’m rather confused about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic.
From the Big Think Video
I get asked a lot about the state of capitalism and I think that for those members of society of a certain age we think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with Socialism perhaps or even Communism. But we never really saw the capitalism might be defeated by its own child : Technology.
And I think that what we find is that even the most die-hard free-market economists usually save place for what they call market failure. That is, markets really only work when the value of something and the price of that object or service coincide. So the key question: is what causes value in price to get out of alignment?
And, in fact, every government on earth has a form of levying taxes of some form, because at some level there are certain things that need to be paid for that cannot, in fact, be priced where they must be valued. So, for example, raising a standing army is tough because if somebody chooses not to pay for it it’s very difficult to exclude them from the protection of that army.
So that in general – what we find is that these market failures are found in every economy, but they are also hopefully a small portion of the economic activity so that we can deal with themas a special edge case. Now the problem with this is the technology appears to do something about figuring out the size of that small slice and making it rather large.
So, for example, if I record a piece of music, once upon a time if you wanted a high quality version of that music you had to go to the folks who actually press the record albums. But now I can record music with arbitrary fidelity and share it as a small file. And my having a copy of that file doesn’t preclude anyone else from copying the file and using it themselves.
There’s no question that the number of times I use that file doesn’t really degrade the file because it’s, in fact, digital.So in that situation musicians were among the first to feel the earth crumble beneath their feet and they had to find new business models because, in fact, they found that they had gone from producing a private good where price and value coincided to producing a public good. And the idea of taxing people to pay for both an army and their diet of jazz and rock’n’roll probably didn’t make a lot of sense.
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Here’s a link to Eric’s edge.org essay on "Anthropic Capitalism & the New Gimmick Economy"
Artificial Intelligence & Out-telligence
We have to embrace the inconsistency of our own minds, not as a bug, but as a feature, that we are in essence, brought here by the forces of selection. We are the products of systems of selective pressures, and what they seem to do is, to create the ability to run many many different programs, and often contradictory programs within the same mind.
The question is why have we put such an extraordinary emphasis on intellectual consistency, so that we are constantly alerted to the hypocrisy of others, but we are seemingly blind to it in ourselves.
Our mind is constructed with an architecture that allows us to run various sandboxes, where we can experiment with the ideas of others without actually becoming the other. Can we run another mind in emulation, perhaps not as well as its original owner?
But can we run that mind well enough to understand it, to empathize with it, and to argue and spar with it, to achieve some kind of better outcome, where we are actually able to turn foes into dancing partners, as we come to show that we’ve actually understood perspectives different from our own.
The biggest objection to this way of thinking is that it’s somehow a kind of a cheat that hypocrisy is being summoned by another name. But I think this is actually incorrect. I think that we have these sandboxes, for example, so that we can fight more effectively a foe, that we feel we must defeat.
So for example: recently I talked about the importance of being able to run a jihadi sandbox in our minds, if we want to understand the forces that are behind Islamic terror, and its effect, on what I think are relatively fragile western sensibilities about life and death.
And so if we choose not to empathize with the other, to say, that so much as beyond the pale, we are probably not going to be very effective in understanding that the other does not see itself as evil. It does not see itself as an enemy that must be fought. I don’t necessarily need to agree with it, but to demonstrate that I can’t even run the program, simply for the purpose of social signaling seems the height of folly.
How do we hope to become effective if we can’t guess what the other will do next?
There are limits to this, we have to have a certain kind of consistency of mind. But the idea that you can’t be capable of running a diehard rationalist materialist atheist program, as well as a program that says perhaps I will open myself to transcendental states. And if I need to anthropomorphize those as coming from a deity.. perhaps the idea is that that architecture is not what a Richard Dawkins would suggest: as a kind of mind virus, but in fact, it’s a facility that we choose to deny ourselves at our peril.
What if we’re trapped on a local maximum of fitness, and in fact, we need to get to higher ground. But the idea is that the traversal of the so-called adaptive Valley, where we have to make things much much worse, before they get much better. What if the idea is that cannot generally be attempted rationally.. that we need a modicum of faith, a belief, that we cannot reference to any sort of information set. We could end up trapped on local maxima forever.
But I think it’s really important to consider that some people may be able to traverse the adaptive valley without belief in a deity — some may need a temporary belief in a deity; some may be able to reference some sort of a transcendental state, and steal ourselves, in order to make the journey.
But however it is accomplished, there are times, when it would appear that all hope is lost, and that if we are not to end our days stuck on these local maximum, whatever we have achieved, that we have to fundamentally experiment with ways of thinking, if only temporarily, to get us to higher ground.
On Math & Music
So Jimi Hendrix… you’re dealing with a super mind as well as an intuitive genius. He played the guitar amplification signal processing system as a whole.
There are these people who are just in some multidimensional space. Another one of my favorites is Roy Buchanan who somehow these guys who understand harmonics gravitate to telecasters and a pop song called ‘Roy’s blues’ and watch him go into a multiverse and start playing with things that you can’t even imagine are possible.
I do think that there’s a very close relationship between algorithms and emotions. I wrote about a python program and put it in a tweet, and it only purpose was to generate the core progression for Pachobel’s Canon, which is if you want people to cry at a wedding that’s the core progression to play, but it’s actually an algorithm that breaks your heart is very frightening.
I think at some point you learned that music is an abstraction, and that each particular instrument is just a way to instantiate the same common abstraction and so this was extremely powerful for me.
I don’t really hear music very well. I don’t have a lot of intuitive feel for it. To me it looks like systems. And the idea that music was so highly systematized and that this was covered up by the standard relationship that we pick up where we take music lessons, we learned to read music in this country. Lots of people are bad at reading music, and lots of people are bad at following instructions, but you find that in other areas of the world in which notation isn’t a big part of musical education, people very casually pick up an instrument and start playing.
I think it’s because the systems, if you will the math behind the music, is so powerful that it allows you to improvise, it allows you to compose, and to understand that there are canonical songs. At some point for example, I wrote a tiny computer program in Python and put it in a tweet and it’s only purpose was to reproduce the chord progression for Pachelbel’s Canon as an algorithm.
In other words, that so much of our musical system is in the math and in the physics of a vibrating string. There’s really one crazy innovation which is even temperament, which the West figured out, which has to do with a strange math fact that if you raise the number two, for twice the frequency, which gives us the octave to the 19th power, and then take the twelfth root thereof, that’s almost exactly equal to three. And that weird numerical accident is what makes it possible to both have extremely beautiful intervals, but have them also so regular that you can do harmony and make chords. I don’t think most musicians probably even know why we use a 12-ton system.
There’s like a five dimensional lattice in your mouth to produce the international phonemic alphabetic. So your nose could be on or off, that’s one degree of freedom.
The Sarangi, the Indian violin is the closest phonemic sound of the human voice.
The instruments I regularly check in with would be mandolin, harmonica, guitar, piano and occasionally some funkier stuff than that. Turkish and Indonesian were great fun to learn about and learn some of. Russian is extremely emotional but grammatically fairly unforgiving. I enjoyed the little bit of Thai that I started trying to learn, because tones. But when I tried a little bit of Vietnamese the tones were so hard that there was no satisfaction. I spent three weeks and I couldn’t say my first word convincingly.
I think that these areas are so intrinsically human and we don’t even realize that there are these systems that are undergirding it. I think that there’s at least that as a formal similarity where you know until until Chomsky and his thoughts on grammar, we didn’t understand the way in which this could be potentially an innate process. these iconic intervals are really based on physics.
Math in Economics
PIA: You came at the field as an outsider you can with a mathematics background and ran into some of the incentive structures within the economics profession, within the Big Ten, to find that many people are somewhat suspicious of the role of mathematics. What do you feel like we're getting wrong? What do you think that math has to offer that we might not be seeing?
ERIC: So it's a great question. I think that first of all we have to be honest with ourselves that a lot of math has crept in for the purposes of intimidation: to make cryptic which is otherwise simple, and to create a kind of interference competition, where the field could be restricted to a smaller number of players. So I think that there's a tremendous amount of abuse of mathematics, and I think that that's probably the right way for the innate energy to be funneled towards the views, but unfortunately it ends up too often funneled towards the mathematics itself, where people have been brutalized by an instrument that in fact is not biased good or bad.
And I think one place where you can see the difference is by asking that there be some sort of pros explanation for why a particular piece of mathematics needs to be introduced? So off the top of my head that one of the things that bothers me most is that economists have all sorts of data typing problems: we call things by scalars, that are actually fields. No one would accept the idea that the temperature in America yesterday was 70 degrees, because we know we have Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, and Maine, which are all likely to have different temperatures, but too often we're willing to say the rate of inflation is X or growth was y in some particular quarter.
So one of the problems is that you're feeding the wrong data types back into the models - this means you can't make use of the field concept, which is used to regulate other self-regulating systems, as it is let's say in theoretical particle physics. So one candidate would be, why is it that we've accepted that these models are prejudiced from inception, to deliver certain kinds of conclusions? Having a single Scalar for inflation or growth? Obviously means that the gauge is susceptible to fiddling. But if you try to fiddle with an entire field properly, that is a field concept, it's almost impossible. So I would love to see more autonomous mathematics that is not quite so amenable to special pleading from powerful interests.
Math in America
DAVE: So do you weep for the state of math in America right now, just the public state of it?
ERIC: Oh I have a totally different impression. I think we are unbelievable at science and engineering and that what we are actually in is a multi-year multi, decade conspiracy effectively to deny just how good our educational system can be, just how good some of our people are, and this has to do with the economics of staffing the STEM work force - science and engineering.
So in order to get the money get the labor we've had to continually pretend as if Americans are terrible at mathematics, when I think we're actually really good. We have a very heterogeneous K through 12 system and some schools are terrible, but there are lots of terrific ones. We have high schools multiple Bronx Science Stuyvesant, Far Rockaway which is now closed which have produced multiple Nobel Prize winners, and yet we pretend that we are somehow lagging, we are incapable and incompetent and it really has to do with the labor market issues where scientific employers are always looking to get lower cost labor. They prefer usually to import talent and effectively poverty from relatively less well-off countries to staff our science and engineering workforce.
So I actually think we're doing terrifically well I think math is in very good shape. I think physics is theoretical physics has been having a much harder time of it for the last 40 odd years. So I'm pretty happy with mathematics.
DAVE: That's really interesting. So I never heard of it framed in a Labour sense so you're saying basically that if a kid goes through our school system is a real genius great at math science etcetera, etcetera, that the workforce still would look to someone from another country basically because they could pay them less.
ERIC: Well I think would there's a big critique which is that sometime around 1970 the engines of authentic growth within the American economy and in the world economy sort of mysteriously started to sputter. So if you think about post--world War II, anything that is built on a growth expectation is going to have the characteristic for example a law firm where a partner is going to have several associates under them under him or her trying to become partners. So while you're growing that's possible but when you hit steady-state every one of these institutions with an embedded growth hypothesis becomes a Ponzi scheme.
So the problem is we absorb this throughout our country and the universities function just like that law firm where one professor is hoping to train 20 future professors over a lifetime, right. We had about 8% of the country educated post secondarily after high school before world war ii and then we got up to about 50%. So that expansion fueled a golden age because you could do all sorts of things with promising people a future while having them contribute their youth into a system. Then when that stopped between 1970-1980 there was a sort of a panic. Then we had to restart 'as if' growth - fake growth - and you did that by offshoring you did that by mergers you did that by playing around with numbers.
So the universities got caught up in that and that's really the problem is is that we've learned how to play the science and engineering shortage card. There's no such thing as a long term labor shortage in a market economy because the wage level, like, there's no job an American won't do I will literally clean your bathroom with my toothbrush if the price is right.
So the same way I have a Steinway storage in my apartment, not because there's no Stein ways to be had but because I don't feel like shelling out for the grand piano that I've always dreamed of.
Anti-expert
So you're going to have to seat people - the panthers are in general what I call anti experts. They're people who usually have the credentials, they're known in the community, people are very uncomfortable with them, they'll talk to them privately but they won't seat them on the main stage. Some of these people are very tough to deal with.
I got Nassim Taleb in front of Congress and Nassim is a very tough person for most people to deal with. But the fact is is that he's just - as Jordan Peterson says ultimately one of the most disagreeable people around. He wants to protect the system against crazy risk-taking by bank heads who get the profits and then socialize the losses and the risk.
So you're gonna sort of keep this guy off to the side where everybody knows his name, but nobody wants to deal with them. Well this is kind of a profile - who are the people who the system discarded between 1980 and 2008 for standing up, and who have some trap? Well, he's an egotist, he doesn't publish, he fundamentally is talking in his own language. Those tells are the people that need to be introduced back into the system if we're going to get the Panther effect.
DAVE: So just to be clear though so in terms of Trump. It seems to me that he is one of those guys whether you like him or not he was one of those guys that was on the outside saying something that was a kind of real. He just went in with a sledgehammer.
ERIC: So he may have some intuitions. To take a very simple one.
DAVE: I’m not saying he's a great intellect, but as Jordan has said right here, the guy’s obviously a lot smarter than most people are giving him credit for.
ERIC: I'm not claiming that - look he has a certain kind of genius and I haven't backed off of that. He's got a lot of intuitions, not all of which are wrong. That's not the issue. The issue is, this is some surgical stuff. If you're going to fundamentally try to fix let's say America's immigration issues, you've got to go in there with nano knife and be very very careful because our country is multicultural. It is never going to be a white nation - ever - it's never gonna happen.
The way in which people who would intuit that something is wrong with our immigration policy, and intuit that it's been used, but they can't ground that in some sort of analytic framework deal with it. Sooner or later you start hearing ‘Well, the Mexicans are sending us their rapist’. Well, are there some rapists that are being sent or coming from Mexico? Yes, but you can't do that without destroying the fabric of this country.
This is where it's a pleasure to antagonize the far right. The Richard Spencer fantasies about racial purity. The amount of violence you would have to use if you tried to implement that, let along the fact that it's a terrible idea, would be so enormous. We don't even know what these people are talking about.
It's important that you don't flirt with this. You don't want more than a thousand people in the country carrying around citronella candles and saying things about blood and soil. That's a very dangerous idea to fan the flames up.
So the thing that I personally had the hardest time with Trump on was, during the campaign he said this thing about, ‘we used to have a beautiful system. If we had protesters at a political rally we'd rough them up, and if you do that I'll pay your legal bills’ I thought did you just seriously write a blank check that if there's some crazy person here who chooses to you know stick a knife in somebody. You're gonna pay that person's legal bills? That was the moment I realized that no matter what he might get right, and no matter what he might intuit, he's playing a kind of sloppy game with the world that's Russian roulette.
We can't have somebody in that office playing that game, just the way we can't have a Hillary Clinton servicing this crazy narrative that gets us deeper and deeper in intellectual debt.
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DAVE: What is the anti-expert?
ERIC: Well, going back to the Nassim Taleb again. Nassim Taleb was at one point was the best person to get in front of the house committee on finance, but it was blocked because it had been sort of captured by outside forces.
So I tried to get him onto the House Science and Technology Committee to tell us why the world had blown up during the 2008 crisis and they launched every objection to our friend Nassim, and I said well, he’s not an academic, and he’s got kind of Professorial position. It turns out that has all of the right credentials, but he doesn’t follow the conclusions that the field has followed and so his conclusions are different but the problem is that he’s got much of the credentials that terrify the community because because it’s like having somebody say I’m a climate scientist, I have completely different models than you do.
Let’s talk technically and we’ll see where we’re discordant and somebody says well no, that's settled. Well, maybe I have a different perspective. So an anti expert isn't somebody who has all of the same credentials as an expert, but has reached radically different conclusions than their community and still wants to remain in that kind of dialogue to find out whether they are right or wrong, and that person is usually somebody who has been shoved off to the side because nobody in the field wants to have the argument live with scorekeepers because it will generally show that the conclusions are not nearly as strong ground as they might be.
DAVE: Yeah and everybody doesn’t want to be associated with them because they you will immediately smeared with the same things.
ERIC: This is tarring by association and so you have these incredible chain links which you know somebody knows somebody who met with somebody who once said good morning which is also something that Joesph Goebbels - he was always saying good morning everyday.
Russell Conjugation
Russell Conjugation (or Emotive Conjugation) is a presently obscure construction from linguistics, psychology and rhetoric which demonstrates how our rational minds are shielded from understanding the junior role factual information generally plays relative to empathy in our formation of opinions.
I am firm. [Positive empathy]You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy] He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy]
The thing that I was searching for was what word should I use that sounds like synonym where two words are content synonyms but maybe emotionally antonym. So a good one is think and whistle blower right. Somebody in Florida wrote and said you’re looking for a motive conjugation or Russell conjugation. Turns out Bertrand Russell had been here earlier and in 1948 he was on the BBC and he said ‘Let’s look at the construction:
’I am firm. You are obstinate. He, she or it is a pig headed fool’
That was just a moment where I said oh my gosh I don’t realize that I have been given no extra information about the three conjugations that he’s gone through, and yet I feel differently.
I liked the fact that somebody is firm and steadfast, and I dislike the fact that somebody is pigheaded. And then I realized that this could actually be weaponized and as part of an arms race that maybe the newspapers were in fact conjugating ‘President’ ‘strong-man’ ‘dictator’ and so I remembered this very strange phrase from years past. Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. I thought who would come up with a construction that awkward and always invariant. And then everyone repeats it.
A controversial businessman was applied to a friend of mine. Declan Ganley who had fought the Lisbon Treaty in the EU, and at some point they removed controversial businessman, so he just became businessman Declan Ganley.
And so what I came to understand is that the big boys don’t play around with faking the facts. What they realized is that we have multiple opinions on everything but our emotional state selects which opinion, and the person who figured this out is Frank Luntz, and Frank Luntz was a Republican pollster.
There’s video of him where he asks people you know what do you think about undocumented workers? Oh you know they’re doing a great job and we have to recognize the contribution will you support illegal aliens, no no no. They should be deported. And in an instant and then you see that the mind doesn’t see itself it’s having two reactions to death tax and a state. It’s the same object and so we are both for and against everything.
And so while we’re watching information they’re not looking at information, they’re looking at the emotional shading because our emotions pick out which of our multiple opinions were actually going to act. And so what I’m pointing to here is that this is the language that you need to get underneath the constructed world that you’re presented with.
What I hope is that this essay is going to show people that you can code up a computer program to crawl text with it against a table of Russell conjugates, to figure out what the exact bias is of any news source. I don’t need to know about Breitbart is conservative. Let me crawl it.
Write a python program, use regular expressions, grab the text, match it against the table, and I’ll tell you exactly what you’re being told to feel. Irrespective, you can be trusted with the knowledge, but you what you can’t be trusted with is your feelings, because the feelings determine the opinion. And so this is the great binary weapon – the information superhighway, had very little effect relative to what we were expecting, because it needs the second emotional component. There’s no emotional superhighway to go next to it.
New York times and social media, VS real world experience
I’m trying to get the power tools into the hands of the people who’ve not been trusted with them, and say hey I want to upgrade my relationship. I don’t really want to kill the New York Times. I want the New York Times to learn how to respect people, who are as smart or smarter than the editors who drive the narratives, than the reporters who go out and report. I want them to come to see themselves as part of the problem, and part of the story, which is, please stop with the editorial headline, everything’s editorialized now. Right, stop with the narratives and you’re going to have to be in partnership because you don’t have the gate-keeping ability anymore.
And previously we democratized information but we kept turning the New York Times. Please tell me how to feel those aren’t revolutions in Tahrir Square — those are demonstrations right. And so I was the one who was off of social media I was saying I’m watching a revolution, but in New York when I went to a party you would say, what you are talking about.. the demonstration right. And so these conjugates.
It’s only when you actually hear the authoritative source that you’ve empowered, to switch the language, you actually feel safe because what happens is if you just take what you see, and then you go into your social group you will find that you will be instantly ostracized, and so what we’ve been depending on the New York Times not for information, we’ve been depending upon it for to tell us what’s safe to feel. Whom should I empathize? Who should I consider a pariah? Who should I hug to my bosom?
Richard Nixon announced an over a billion dollar initiative to begin what was called the war on cancer. Of course war is a little bit of a weird metaphor, but it’s very hard to get large numbers of people to buy in together for anything that doesn’t have ‘war’ like characteristics.
Did we loose the war on cancer for so many years because it always was actually a war on design constraints, and there were two of them, one of which was cancerous and the other of which senescent and the two of them were in fact playing off each other?
Intellectual Dark Web
If you are trying to silence a small number of people, the thing to do is proximate them to a lot of really terrible stuff. So for people who don’t have time to say I neither condemn or condone, it’ll create enough fear & doubt in their minds. Tag that which you wish to neutralize, in a context that suits a given narrative. What you are seeing is the institutions treating us almost like an infection, but their immune system is weakened. The media doesn’t like competition & sense making.
The Intellectual Dark Web actually is an alternative sense making collective.
So in this case these so-called IDW will take what is ever happening in the world and will try to analyze it. But very often it sounds very different than what you see in typical mainstream publications, particularly those that we on the left and depended upon for curating the interpretations of what is happening in the world.
The so called commentary, and that is the people who regularly give their takes on what’s happening in the world, seem to have been somewhat captured by a new network which thinks in terms that are very different to the networks that have previously lived at these organizations.
And as a result I believe that the Intellectual Dark Web is going to be perceived as rivals, and then therefore instead of the commentariat giving an accurate assessment of what we’re doing, they’re going to view us as a rival to their business model, and they’re going to attack on those terms.
One pattern, that is really interesting, which is you put a ton of pressure on a large group of people to salute some flag that shouldn’t be saluted, and most people make the calculation, do I really want to screw up my life just over whether or not I salute the flag whether that’s maybe it’s diversity or multiculturalism or something that sounds pretty good, and has a lot of good stuff in it, and then you’ve got like one person who will stand up and say you cannot compel me.
This is how we found Bret, It’s how we found Jordan Peterson, it’s how we found Lindsey Shepherd.. and in all cases the commonality seems to be that the person who doesn’t salute the flag usually has a very deep reason. It’s not just that it’s wrong. It’s that they’ve got an entire worldview. So what the least interesting thing about these people is the thing for which they came into the spotlight.
And so the whole idea is, isn’t it interesting that the only people willing to screw up their entire lives over these things, are people who the crowd will find — it’s like a truffle hound. You want to find the really interesting Professor at some not so interesting field or department, or it out of the way University.
You just have compelled, everybody is going to sing the following anthem every morning at 8:00 a.m. and the person who says no, that person’s research which is totally unrelated to singing the anthem at 8:00 am, wearing yellow or whatever thing you were you’re asking that person to do. That person is most likely to be the person who is doing groundbreaking research in an area that you would never know.
They are coming after the people who are the least racist, the most forward thinking the most thoughtful the most nuanced. This is no coincidence. When a guy like Bret Weinstein has literally given up an Ivy League education under death threats to stand up for those less fortunate, he’s probably not loosing a lot of sleep over his own racism.
Everyone’s a racist, everyone’s racially aware. We can show the neuroscience studies that show that people identify with, even if you put a bracelet around a hand to show that somebody is in your affinity group, and the bracelet says atheist, you know the reaction will spike through the roof. So we know that there’s an affinity. There’s some kind of latent kind of racism and everyone including blacks, not just limited to whites.
This guy, who’s the most aware he can give you the science, he can give even the introspection and that’s why this was also sort of hysterically funny when the dust settles and everybody’s out of harms way we’re going to look back on this and say wow they picked on Brett Weinstein, that’s how crazy this got.
Overton Window
Everybody wants to to be loved, to fit in. The fear that happens when you start swimming away from the shore, that you’re not going to find a next Island before your strength gives out. I think it’s very rational to be afraid of thinking for yourself because you may very, very easily find yourself at odds with the community on which you depend. I think for some of us is just a compulsive behavior, it’s not even necessarily the smartest evolutionary strategy. It’s just, it’s hard to do it any other way.
Very often we have some spectrum of difference that we’re allowed. Frequently in politics or news somebody will talk about the Overton Window – what can we discuss what can’t we discuss. ie when Donald Trump said that he wanted to temporary really ban Muslims from entering the US.
I think that a lot of us may benefit from the Overton Window – this idea that we’re going to make certain ideas too hot, too dangerous for people to express in polite company. But on the other hand what we’ve started to do is to hamstring all the cognitive power in our contrarian thinkers, where they don’t feel comfortable or safe thinking aloud.
The top-down thinking tells us what’s acceptable and what isn’t, but the bottom-up leads us to ask all sorts of questions that are framed out, if you will, by the usual terms of discussion.
I think that this is you know this is really animating a lot of people who feel that social justice, which they always thought was a positive, is starting to metastatize into kind of a thought police.
Everybody’s enjoying some privilege at the moment and so if you’re spending all of your time checking and you’re probably not going to be able to say much of anything.
I’m trying to discourage attrition of the amazing people who have something deep and powerful and important to say.