Full Transcript for Why Pessimism Makes Dumb Ideas Sound Smart - David Deutsch - #1164

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chriswilliamson .live I'm kind of fascinated in your worldview from a personal perspective, from a person's perspective. We can talk about how important it is for a society or for civilization or for humanity as a whole to think about the importance of optimism and our capacity to solve problems and stuff like that. I'm kind of interested in how an individual takes that as well.

I think that might be an interesting tension. Obviously, we've had all of this most recent stuff about anthropic researchers leaving and over fears of AI and superintelligence and recursive stuff. I don't know if you're interested in that or if you're kind of a little bit bored of it. I've been talking about it a lot. I'm also interested in how your worldview has changed over the last 15 years since the last book, Human Potential and stuff like that.

So, we can start off and then scurry down whatever rabbit holes sound interesting, if that seems good to you. Sure. Wonderful. Sure. By the way, I think I agree with that, Maxim. So, you know, whenever someone doesn't understand you, it's your fault, not theirs. Unless they're a golden retriever.

Literally. Are you telling me that I've got to get out of jail free card today?

Yeah, yeah. You're human. Yes. Say more on that. Why is it the fault of misunderstanding? Why does that lie in an odd direction? So, I'm, as you will know, I'm a follower of the philosopher Karl Popper. And he has a theory of knowledge which is, in my view, streets ahead of everyone else in the 20th century.

He's a strange kind of reputation because he's very well known, highly respected. You know, people always put him on the list of the 10 top philosophers or something like that. And in science, especially, they always talk about Popper's criterion for distinguishing science from philosophy or from pseudoscience. And yet, his actual philosophy is not very well understood.

And one of the tenets of his philosophy is that there is only one way of creating knowledge. The details are different. But knowledge as created by the process of evolution, as created by a scientist, a mathematician, a child learning to speak their first language. Those processes are all more alike than they are different. The differences are pretty inessential.

And in particular, the process of learning something new, like learning a new law of physics that one has discovered, or learning an existing piece of knowledge, like from someone else, that is all the same process mentally. In all of them, the knowledge that is learned comes from within the learner. So you're learning something. You can't download it like a computer.

You have to guess what the other person means. And at first, you will guess wrong. And so you will have to test those guesses and so on. So if that process goes wrong, it is because the teacher or the professor or the communicator has not pitched it to meet your problem situation. So, yes, go ahead.

What is it that most people misunderstand about being wrong? I think we all have this aversion to making mistakes, to not understanding, to putting errors into the way that we understand the world, or how it is that we're interpreting something else. Is there a better framing for how people should think about wrongness? Yes. So, as Popper said, I'm going to have to stop me quoting him every minute or two.

We are all alike in our infinite ignorance or longer. We may all know different things, different pieces of knowledge, but in our infinite ignorance, we are all alike. So, this all comes from the idea that since there's an infinite distance to go, and we all have different finite amounts of knowledge,

we are all at, like I say in my book, we're all at the beginning of infinity. We're only ever at the beginning. And so, we have something in common with everyone else who is also at the beginning. And to hold oneself up as an authority is a philosophical mistake as well as a, what can you call it, a sociological mistake or a cultural mistake.

It's a power play rather than a participation in the growth of knowledge which we should all be participating in. How should someone hold strong convictions if we all kind of need to remember that we can be completely mistaken at all times and we are vast in our ignorance and partial in our knowledge? Yes. Well, as you're suggesting here, it's a psychological matter.

So, we should not be looking for certainty. We should be looking to correct errors. So, sometimes when people say, oh, I'm certain about something, it means that they have investigated all the possible ways it could be different and they satisfy themselves that those are all wrong and they have their reasons. But more often, certainty is regarded as a virtue in past times.

Faith, obedience, that sort of state of mind was regarded as virtuous. And people judged not only each other but themselves according to how much of that they had. Now, in modern times, especially with the growth of knowledge accelerating more and more in the last couple of hundred years, everyone's had the experience of, well, every adult has had the experience of being proved wrong about something that they were sure was right or something happened that they were sure would never happen.

And so, one should infer from that experience, people don't, but one should infer from that experience, that the subjective sensation of being certain is no guide to the truth. It's no guide at all. And neither is, and this is a bit even harder to internalize, neither is the extent of knowledge or ignorance, because somebody can be very ignorant or even very malevolent, and yet on a particular thing, they might have the truth and you might not.

So, it's no good saying, that's a bad person, I won't listen to them,

because you might be missing the one truth that would save you.

So, again, like I say in the book, if your enemy says that he's going to come and kill you, it might be advisable to believe your enemy when you disbelieve your friend who says, oh, don't mind him, he's just, the bark is worse than his bite. So, you see, it has nothing to do with being knowledgeable, it has nothing to do with being benevolent.

We're all alike in our fallibility. So, the only way to judge ideas is not by someone's authority, or by one's own authority, or by how sure one is, but only by the criterion of whether you have a good explanation for why that truth has had its errors corrected better than all the other truths you've heard or can think of. I can imagine a situation where this becomes, or at least it feels to an individual, very effortful to go through the entire working of the equation in order to arrive at the truth, as opposed to using the shortcuts, as opposed to saying, well, this person seems to be from an illustrious background, and they have been right about other things before,

seemingly, or other people seem to respect their opinion, or they're saying it with a level of fervor that implies that they know what they're talking about.

What is a practical way for people to not take half of the afternoon to decide which sandwich they want, or which would be a more optimal yogurt to purchase? How can people sort of apply this to life without it becoming clunky and slowing them down? So we have a theory about situations that we're in. You know, you talk about sandwiches. So I go into town and buy a sandwich from a sandwich shop, and how do I know it's not poisoned? How do I know it's not off? How do I know that I haven't been handed the wrong sandwich, and so on? Well, as you say, if I went back to first principles to work all that out, it would take all afternoon, and I would be starving to death by the

time I ate anything. So the rational thing to do, as I said, is to form a theory. I have a theory about how chains of sandwich shops work, how they are regulated, for example, by the government, or by the market, or the shop may have a particular ethos that I think they really do have, rather than are pretending, and so on. In the case where I can't say that, then I will have to use different criteria, and in that particular case, I myself would not buy a sandwich unless I had that kind of history and that kind of idea of where this is coming from, where it's coming from intellectually, as well as where it's coming from physically, in mind.

So you don't have to go through the whole thing, because in short,

not only am I able to criticize ideas myself, I'm able to formulate and criticize ideas about other people. It's just that when I formulate an idea about the knowledge of the doctor or the airline engineers who prepared the airplane that I'm going to fly on,

I don't go by their reputation. I go by that theory, and a small fact can destroy a large reputation. Like, if I'm due to fly, and then I read in the newspaper in the morning that that airline has had a scandal where their engineers have been shoddy in preparing the plane, I may well not fly. Even though, I may also think that the chance of the plane going wrong with me on it are actually tiny.

But, you know, maybe now they're only one in a thousand, and ideally I'd like it to be one in a million.

But I could be wrong. Always. Does that mean, is certainty something that we should ever aspire to? No, we should aspire not to have any. Should we aspire to uncertainty then?

Yes. I mean, if you want a life of scientific research, then it's highly desirable that you enjoy the sensation of being baffled, of being in a state of conflict, of thinking, well, now it looks like this is true, but it can't be true. And that sensation is, for example, what attracts me to scientific research. I don't think one should even aspire to believe anything.

I think belief is a corrupt kind of category that has come down to us from Plato and later from Christianity and Islam and so on. Most religions don't value belief. They value ritual and conformity and ways of life. belief was something introduced by Christianity. And it's rather weird if you think about it. As Percy Shelley said in the essay for which he got expelled from Oxford University, he pointed out that you can't believe or disbelieve something by an act of will.

It's got to become via your reason. Therefore,

calling disbelief an immoral thing doesn't make sense. Yeah. Do you know Oscar Wilde's idea of the Oxford Manor? Have you come across this? Don't think so. No. Beautiful. It's just this one line. He refers to the Oxford Manor as the ability to play gracefully with ideas rather than sort of falling into violent or rigid opinions. And I think in my world, which is significantly less salubrious than academia, but maybe just as cutthroat and as much backbiting, the internet is really quick to show its own smarts by pointing out the flaws of others.

And one of the problems that I've found is that the ability to put on a hypothetical hat or in my parlance a bro scientist hat. Look, I'm just trying to play gracefully with ideas. Please give me enough degrees of freedom here to maybe be wrong. But because how would you say like production and publication of ideas are one and the same on the internet.

So you're coming up with things in real time and then they're kind of broadcast out into the world, which means there is no scratchpad. There is no whiteboard that's not publicly available. The whiteboard and the lecture kind of become one and the same. And that means that's been lost at least in a way that a lot of people consume ideas and understand information and sort of see the debate go on.

And I get the sense that kind of what's happened over the last decade or so is a slow increase in the seductivity of certainty and a derogation of uncertainty or incongruence or, you know, like a lack of coherence or something like that because it becomes a target immediately for people on the internet or critics or naysayers or enemies or whatever to kind of point the finger.

Look, he doesn't know that much about this thing because he was pontificating and playing in trying to play gracefully with ideas. Therefore, that means that he must be wrong about as well, which is, I guess in one way we could call this weaponized uncertainty that it is being used as a tool to kind of dismiss someone as a wider thinker as opposed to, hey, like, this is cool.

He's prepared to, I mean, he missed the mark with that, but it's fun. He's able to try and play gracefully with ideas. I thought that kind of related here. Yes. Ideally, Twitter or X is the ideal medium for conjecture, for just throwing ideas out and then having them criticized and come back to you and so on. But because of the phenomenon you're talking about, you can't really do that.

And I have long ago stopped doing that on Twitter. So I think twice and three times and four times before putting something on Twitter, on X. And one thing that's possible to, it's possible to take a middle ground and say, either ask it as a question, does anyone think so -and -so is true? Or you could say, I guess so -and -so might be true.

Or if so -and -so were true, then it might answer this other question. Look at the throat -clearing land acknowledgement that we need to do before we actually put an idea out in a desperate attempt to dampen its impact. Yes, yes. Well, I think it's inevitable. I mean, there are plenty of other places to publish conjectures. The dinner table, maybe.

Yes, in private or in a private chat or or in a more public thing where one labels it as conjecture. For example, I'm just finishing a book on the Fermi paradox or the Fermi problem. And I have some conjectures there, which I think are, well, it's slightly strange. I think they're possible solutions to the Fermi problem. but I am sure, certain, you know, which I shouldn't be, that they are not true.

But I just would like to put them out there in the form, look how easy it is to make up ideas about this and for them to be wrong. That's the idea. So I've written it as a science fiction story set in another universe, not in our universe. so I don't have to answer for the discrepancies between this universe and our universe. So I just mention that because that's one of many ways one can get criticism of conjectures.

But also always it is one should think carefully about when to expose an idea to criticism. criticism. If one does it too early it may cut off lines of

thought which, although false, would lead to something true if one perceived them seriously. Oh, that's so cool. That is so cool. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with element in it.

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You're heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. So you're saying that if you have this nascent

early stage idea and you put that out, somebody comes in with a certainty and criticism which cuts off at the knees the progress of this particular idea of yours, you rob yourself from the opportunity of being wrong in a new way or wrong in multiple new ways which would give you the idea. That is so fun. Also, I've got to call you out for this.

The fact that you have been able to try and play gracefully with ideas with regards to the Fermi problem by constructing an entire new fictional universe in an attempt to get yourself a few million light years of distance away from potential criticism is kind of hilarious. What have you come to believe about the Fermi problem? We

don't know the answer. You could also call it the Fermi mystery but it's not so unusual. we don't know most things. We don't know whether we are alone in the universe. We might be or we might not be. The point I wanted to make is that

it's easy to come up with explanations for why the aliens or their robots are not here yet.

so this is not of the form of problems I like namely it looks as though it must be so and so and yet it also looks as though it can't be so and so. That's the kind of thing that I enjoy thinking about because there are two things which appear to be in collision and like quantum gravity and and no matter how you think about it no matter how whatever angle you look at it it still it still seems like a collision so that's the but but the Fermi problem is not really it's really a collision between one fantasy and another fantasy it's it's we just don't know get over it.

Okay getting back down to terra firma is it fair to say that you hold optimism as a philosophical stance? Yes yes although by optimism I don't mean having a cheerful outlook on life or thinking that everything is going to be all right as a matter of principle I mean that whenever something goes it's more of an explanation for failure than a prophecy of success it's like whenever something goes wrong it's because we had not yet created the knowledge to make it go right it's always a matter of knowledge so

what you asked earlier about when you fail to persuade someone of something or when you fail to teach someone something it's because you haven't yet thought of the way of meeting their problem and of whether you really should be meeting their problem or maybe you should both go and do something better so why is it really necessary for this other person to agree with you on this thing so

that's a uniform application of optimism and pessimism is the opposite it's it's where you regard failure as a barrier as a barrier to ever getting out of the situation or solving the problem or going from bad to good going from bad to good is always

possible and when we fail it is always because we don't yet have the knowledge to succeed

should this broader worldview around optimism should that extend to how we feel about our own lives individually because I have to assume that if you see failure as a way marker on route towards success that's quite agentic it's personal determination I have some sovereignty here I imagine it must be difficult because you mentioned it's not just having a cheerful rosy outlook on life but I imagine in some ways it must be quite difficult to maintain a non -rosy non -cheerful outlook on life if you have a worldview that is predicated on this kind of optimism because you're going to see your own personal struggles through the lens of I just need some more knowledge and I'm

sure I can overcome this thing or I can make the decision that I don't need to overcome this thing I'm interested in how this relates to the individual and how they do deal with adversity and challenges in their own life so optimism is no guarantee that you will solve the problem you might have a terminal illness and the doctor says to you you've got x time to live and you might think

correctly that's because we don't yet have the medical knowledge okay that doesn't mean that there exists a way of you to quickly bone up on all the relevant medical knowledge solve that problem cure that disease and then survive although that has happened remarkably often somebody who's been diagnosed with something that's supposedly terminal has just speed run the solution for it and fixed themselves yes it has happened so it's not impossible that's like those wartime medics where they were the only medic available in the tent and somehow they got shot and you see these guys without anesthetic with a scalpel out operating on himself it feels a little bit like that yes

yes and and the lack of knowledge there might extend further than just the knowledge of how to perform an operation on yourself there's there's a war going on that in itself should not have happened with better knowledge it would not have happened but again that's not a formula for correcting it yourself in the tent so on the other hand you can't say what you will solve you might solve it but the in regard to what you do you do not think this is insoluble you do not think this is how far reason can reach and from now on reason doesn't have any access that's always false yeah I wonder why do you think it is that pessimism so often masquerades as sophistication I thought

you were going to ask a different question why it masquerades as sophistication because say

you're writing a story about some characters who you're making the reader like the characters and suddenly one of the characters is going to get killed and you know and you're thinking can they be saved can they be saved and in the last chapter they're not saved now that is easy to write because

knowledge in fiction is very hard to create just as in real life if to make a realistic story about how this situation which you've set up to look as though that favored character is going to die how that can end up with them being saved is hard it's similarly hard to solving it in real life so some authors just pull the solution out of a hat the deus ex machina as the ancient Greeks presumably didn't say so if you do that the audience will be disappointed they'll say we've been had I've just spent two hours watching this movie or several days reading this long novel and

the author has led me along and then he's tricked me at the end it was all a dream for example yeah that's another way of doing it so it's all a dream so but similarly what is not really realized is that the opposite tactic of saying not only does he die but everybody dies like in Hamlet that is equally a cop out anyone can write that ending just like anyone can write the deus ex machina ending what you need to do is to solve the problem so that you will have told the reader some knowledge some and you know if it's a good novel it should be knowledge about life in general which they can use to understand the world and their own life and their friends and so on it should

enrich the person but having it end unhappily is always a cheat

and that's true whether it's a happier or a sad ending pulled out of a hat what's a current problem that you think people are most unnecessarily pessimistic about right now

well I guess it's the AI doom scenario it might be the climate catastrophe scenario I'm not sure exactly whether it's the same people who are worried about both thought I think the Venn diagram has probably got a good bit of crossover yeah yeah they are both examples of

looking at a problem and thinking of it as a barrier so you say so and so could happen we could all die you're not taking into account that that is true that is always true that has always been true every day that the human species has existed it's always been true that we could be hit by a comet and all die in fact just recently the probability of that has gone down drastically because we finally turned our attention as a species to the problem of diverting comets and asteroids but if they're big enough we still can't do it but still the probability of it has gone down people used to worry about things like the oxygen will run out of the air because we're consuming

oxygen and where's it going to come from and

people have worried about things that aren't even

rational fear like the apocalypse or the world is going to end on such and such a day and we'll all be judged wanting Wanting and so on.

So, yeah, at the moment, I think it's the AI thing and the climate catastrophe thing. It's not that those fears couldn't come true. It's that when you see them in perspective, you see that it's an arbitrary choice to pick those things. In a slightly different universe, we're still worrying about something else or we're worrying about whatever the next thing is.

Which we can't predict yet. You hold, I would imagine, a rather unpopular opinion in the modern world, which is that AGI's aren't going to pose much greater risk than humans already are. What's your perspective at the moment on this AGI thing? I mentioned to you earlier on this Jacob Coxon guy who was at OpenAI, I think, for about three years.

He was at Anthropic recently and he tweeted yesterday, I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre -training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing towards self -improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. Some other safety researcher from Anthropic said there's a more than 10% chance that advanced AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

Models potentially have a lower risk at the moment, but future systems could become more capable, etc., etc. Given your background, quantum computing, etc., how do you come to think about this conversation? So, I think it's not a justified fear, as I've just said, for reasons I've just said. But, you know, I'm old and I remember when people were saying this about nuclear reactors.

And they said it so loudly and so often that people stopped making nuclear reactors, thereby causing the present climate problem.

So, they didn't know. They picked, from my point of view, they picked at random one of the many bad things that could happen, but we don't know whether they will or won't. But there's no particular reason to think that they will, even though they could. And they picked that one at random and they alarmed everybody and people took drastic action to avoid that alarm with catastrophic results.

The worst effect on the environment that our species has ever had was the turn away from nuclear power. So, if we turn away from artificial intelligence because of a similar fiction, will it be? No, I was going to say it might well be a bigger catastrophe.

I think I was a bit tempted to say something dramatic. No, I think it would be a big catastrophe, but not as big. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body, and that is why I partnered with Function.

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That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. I don't know. I spent a good bit of time over the last few months in SF and talking to people on every side of the fence, including sort of with the fence up inside of them as well, straddling both sides.

Certainly, at least a relatively uncontroversial opinion seems to be LLMs are not the architecture that can get us to something that is very scary, that is going to be able to take over the world. Is that something that you would agree with? Absolutely. I think that follows directly from Popper's epistemology because the LLMs do not have a module in them capable of creativity.

So they are– I mean, they can do remarkable things. And a few years ago, I wouldn't have guessed that this kind of functionality is on the horizon for another 50 years. And yet, it came all at once and everything worked one after the other. And the people who did it think that AGI is going to work as well for the same reason. But the present LLM -based AIs, not only have they not shown any sign of AGI, but we know how they work, or at least some people know how they work.

I don't. But we do know that the people who designed them did not say, now we know what creativity really is. Now we can program it, and all we need is some supercomputers. And they didn't say that. They said, now we can build a language model which will be able to speak English properly. And I would be like, good luck with that. And they did.

But it's one thing to achieve functionality that makes sense epistemologically and to achieve it much faster than was thought. And it's another to achieve a functionality that violates our best theory of what knowledge is. And that's another thing. People who think that LLMs are going to deliver AGI don't say, for example, well, Popper had only an approximation to the true theory of knowledge.

He didn't realize that there's a gap in his theory. And this gap we have filled. We know how to fill that gap. And so if you just use his old theory, you'll say that AGI is impossible this way. But if you know what we know, then you'll see why it's possible. They're not claiming that. They're saying it'll just happen if they have more compute, if they have more computer power available.

But it's a previous kind of slight blip of the same type was when chess engines first started defeating grandmasters, the best grandmasters at chess. So a lot of people were saying, well, some people were saying, no, they'll never do it because humans have got some special thing in their brains and whatever. And other people were saying, no, it's just a matter of doing it more computer power.

But that's different because they had a theory of why it just requires more computer power. And when they achieved it, this is the thing that's hardly ever mentioned. When a chess engine beats a grandmaster, they're doing it in a different way. The computation that is going on in the chess engine is a radically different kind of computation from the computation that's going on in the grandmaster.

The grandmaster is doing only like one millionth of the amount of computing power, of computation than the chess engine does. And yet can reach a very high level, not quite as high as the machine, as the program. But still, they are doing a completely different thing. And although we know how to write the program of a chess engine, we do not know how to write the program of a grandmaster.

And this is why grandmasters can write a book, you know, my greatest games and how I won them or, you know, something like that. And a chess engine can't. If you ask a chess engine how it won, it will say, well, if you do this move, then that will happen. And if that happens, this will happen. If that happens, this will happen. Down to, you know, however many steps it can do nowadays.

And a grandmaster will not say that. A grandmaster can't follow it down to anywhere near as many steps as a chess engine can. But a grandmaster will say something like, well, I thought that if I give up this pawn, it's going to create a weakness on the G file. And by weakness, he doesn't mean that he's followed down all the possible continuations.

Whereas something that can follow down all the continuations, and by the way, some of those continuations may not lead to victory. He might say, I thought this might work, but then five moves later, the bastard found a way out of it. And that can also happen. That also can't happen to a chess engine. So there are different types of program.

We do not know how to write the grandmaster type of chess program, let alone an AGI. You know, when the grandmaster gets up, he then starts performing computations of orders of magnitude greater complexity than playing chess. It's just that he's not engaging competitively in something that requires insight. What is creativity, in your opinion? How do you think about explaining that simply? The way I use the term is perhaps different from the way philosophers and others use it.

Creativity, I think, is not that impressive a thing, just creativity by itself. I use that word to mean the ability to create new knowledge. So evolution is creative, is a creative process in that sense, in that it starts off with an animal that can't fly, and then a few million years later, it has created an animal that can fly. And it can fly because its genes encode knowledge of how to fly, including implicitly knowledge of aerodynamics and all sorts of things that we don't even have a handle on yet.

So it has created knowledge. The thing that humans have and that no existing other species has, although there were species in the past that had this, is explanatory creativity, where we can, like with the chess master, not only we can say, I prefer this move to that move, you can say why. So I want to pick up this burning branch from the wildfire, like, say, the first person who invented a campfire.

I was just writing about this in my forthcoming book, actually.

I want to pick this up because I want to carry it with me. And if I carry it with me, maybe the predators who might otherwise attack me, and I'm carrying food from the latest kill, will run away from me instead of me running away from them. Now, that idea, that's not induction. That's not any of the pre -popper ways of thinking of the growth of knowledge.

He's not doing something he's seen before. He's imagining something that he's never seen before, that no one has ever seen before, namely carrying a branch for protection against the predators. And then as he walks home with it, then he'll say, oh, well, it's getting dark, but I can still see. Maybe, maybe, if I get this all the way home, we'll all be able to be protected from the wild animals, and so on.

That's the kind of thinking that cannot be characterized as optimizing for a given outcome, like checkmate, or like proving a mathematical theorem. It's more like discovering a new mathematical object, which is interesting, but you can't give a computer a criterion of interesting. So, humans can change the axioms to better axioms.

Humans are not just meeting a fixed criterion, and also humans can change their mind. He might decide, well, we might scare off the predators this way, but we're getting burnt by the flames, and it's not going to last us all the way home, so we better throw it away now and run home.

That's the sort of thing you can think if you have a genuine problem situation in mind rather than a criterion to meet. What do you make, given the importance of understanding education, modesty, or sort of nobility, humility when it comes to learning? What do you make of the current education system? So, I think that our society's present attitude to education, both for children and for in universities and for everybody in their own life, is based on a wrong theory.

It's what Popper calls the bucket theory of the mind, which is that knowledge is a kind of fluid, which some people have and some people don't have of a particular kind. And the task is for the person who has it to pour it into the bucket. That is, the recipient is a kind of bucket for knowledge, which is initially empty, and you pour the knowledge in.

So, that is very bad in a number of ways. In fact, education is the last holdout of pre -enlightenment theories of knowledge. Everywhere else, we at least give lip service to enlightenment theories, like you don't give someone authority to override the wishes of someone else. You don't necessarily respect the opinion of someone else just because of their status and so on.

We may not enact this perfectly, as we were saying earlier in this conversation, but it's largely agreed that this is what we should be doing. In education, it's the other way around. We judge education by how well and how accurately you fill the bucket. And so, one of the things that's wrong with that is that when something goes wrong, which it nearly always does, then you will immediately jump to the conclusion.

So, what has gone wrong? Well, the bucket, it's either leaky or it didn't want to receive the fluid. But there can't be anything wrong with the fluid because the fluid is knowledge. That is, by definition, what we want to transfer. By definition, transferring it is success. So, we measure success according to, say, exam results or something.

And then because of the natural arms race or the self -sustaining situation that happens in many human situations that aren't rational,

the incentive is to spend more and more time on meeting the criterion and less and less time on things that can't be measured, which are the important things. So, at least with chess, you can measure how good a grandmaster is, although you cannot easily measure how good a grandmaster is at explaining or at teaching or at giving a running commentary on chess games.

There is no criterion for that. There's no mechanical way you can say, well, I've got 93% on the explaining my moves test, so I must be good at explaining my moves. There is no such thing. And everything that is important in education is of that type and not of the testable type. I omit things where being able to execute the criterion perfectly is the task, like being an airline pilot.

But even an airline pilot, you know, an airline pilot who doesn't know what the different controls do is not going to be a good airline pilot. But even with an airline pilot, understanding is extremely important. It may not be as important as being able to operate the controls, but it is extremely important.

But things that we learn in school and in most university courses are not like that. The course and the exam are designed as proxies for the thing that you actually want. And they are very poor proxies. The only reason they are proxies at all is that people who really want to do the thing are willing to waste their time learning to pass the criterion.

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What's your advice? Upending is outside my wheelhouse. I don't know how to formulate good political policies that will gain wide acceptance. But technically, we do now, with the internet, we do have the means of completely upending the system and not having any compulsory education, certainly for children. But I think there are more and more ways of adapting university education to technologies like the internet and also collaborative technologies where you have, for example, access to somebody.

Access to somebody can be very valuable where compulsory subordination to that very same person would be very bad for you.

So today, anyone can write an email to any famous person and have a reasonable chance of getting an answer, even if it's only read my book, you dolt. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is a lot better than what things used to be like, say, even 30 years ago. But even 30 years ago, it would have been better, in my opinion, not to have compulsory subjects and not to have compulsory education of any kind. What do you think about discipline and forcing yourself to do things? I've seen that you appear to be very anti this, despite it being kind of the...

one of the most popular worldviews at the moment to put your feelings to one side and push through and sort of ignore how you feel. What's your perspective on discipline? Like many things in epistemology and in psychology, the same words, the same terms can be used to describe absolutely opposite things. So, for example, take a mountaineer who enjoys climbing Mount Everest or difficult mountains, who looks for difficult climb where other people have failed, perhaps other people have been killed, and he goes on the climb and on the climb he undergoes severe privation and what would be suffering to almost anyone else.

But to him, it's just privation. It's, you know, it's getting cold. Every fiber of his being wants to go back down and get back in the warm. But he wants to get to the top. And all the pain and suffering and discomfort is just... It's not just... It's not that he overrides it, though in a sense he does. But what's really happening is that that's what he's there for.

That's why he chose this climb. If it were easy, he wouldn't have chosen it.

So what is... For one person, the very... You know, this is the reason he's alive. This is the reason he gets up in the morning. It is in anticipation of doing this thing. For almost anyone else, it would be torture. What's more, almost anyone else couldn't do it well enough. They would eventually fall off. It's only because he loves it that he has put in the amount of practice and work and thinking and analysis and so on that allows him to reach the top of this difficult climb.

This is... In the case of mountaineering, we're talking about actual pain. And so on. But most things don't have actual pain, physical pain. But they do have psychological pain, boredom, despair, fear, and all that kind of thing. And so in that sense, I think the mountaineer is a good analogy to all learning. All learning should be like that.

It should be something that you would...

You would pay the price to have it. Just like the mountaineer does. Or like I was talking the other day to a Formula One driver. And I was saying, God, you know, in Formula One racing, you have to have reactions that are approximately one half the length of a human reaction time. So that means that you must start doing the thing before you have the information in front of you.

Because you have understood the course and the vehicle and so on well enough. And you must do that again and again and again during the race. And every so often you will spin off. And you will risk your life and so on. And so most people, again, would hate to do that. You know, most people would pay a lot to not have to do that. But also if they were forced to do it, they wouldn't do it well.

Because they do not love it. So I think having discipline and forcing yourself could be a form of words that describes this mountaineer. And in that case, it is wonderful. It is, in a sense, the best thing in the world.

Whereas somebody forcing themselves to get the GCSE maths thing and spending the whole summer preparing for the GCSE maths and just scraping through and then starting the very next day forgetting everything they knew. That is the epitome of something bad. That's something that shouldn't happen.

It's in a rational society. That would never happen. That would be if that happened even once, it would be headline in the newspaper and heads would roll. So from an individual's perspective, obviously, we are still contending with and navigating the world. And it is in some ways scarce or misaligned to what it is that we want to do. So sometimes you have to do that.

You have to use your I will get it done muscle. You don't want to take the you don't want to take the trash out. The trash sucks and it smells and you don't want to do it. But you have to do it. So you're going to do it. Your perspective here is that if we were to construct a rational society, it would be people doing things that are in alignment with what they want to do.

And in the interim between where we are now and hopefully a future world where that's the case, you're going to have to apply some of this. But the goal is to use less and less of it over time. Less and less. Less and less over time, but also less and less in your life.

So first of all, the answer is to get it over with. So you should be leading your good life, not being overwhelmed by the bad things. And then once you've once you're getting it over with, you you can improve the situation. There are no situations or almost no situations in everyday life that cannot be improved a little. So you can apply knowledge to getting it over with a little, you know, I don't know, buy by a better rubbish bin, which is not so disgusting to empty or live in a place where the rubbish bin emptying is easier or is a shorter way or by a different type of bags that you enjoy seeing.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So and then there's there's also the opportunity to just learn to enjoy it. So they're there. Even taking the rubbish out has aspects that one can enjoy. For example, if one has been. Working on the computer all day and and one's one's limbs are forgotten how to move, then at least going out with the rubbish takes you into the fresh air.

Mm hmm. And and you can see the neighborhood and you can say hello to the person across the road who is also taking out their rubbish and so on. So there's nothing that that can't be improved at least a bit. And and it's bad to be in the state of mind that I should have discipline and therefore reducing it is reducing the good thing. It's not reducing the thing you don't like is always good.

Hmm. You mentioned the the good life. What have you come to believe about how people should prioritize their focus in order to achieve something that resembles a good life? Like with many things, diversity is the key. So I don't think there's a formula which applies to to everybody. In fact, I don't think there's a formula that applies to any two people.

Any two people are very different. In fact, more different than we are really capable of understanding. You humans are individual humans are as different from each other as humans in general are from other species. It's every person is like a different species. So what what some people like to live a life of intellectual problem solving. There is a wonderful passage in Popper's autobiography where he says that the thing to do in life is to find a problem.

Don't fall in love with it. Don't fall in love with it. Live with it for the rest of your life. Get get married to it. Live with it for the rest of your life until death do you part. And if you happen to solve it, then the tone in which he says that is if you're unlucky enough to happen to solve it, then there will be delightful problem children.

And it's quite interesting that he uses the phrase problem children deliberately to highlight the fact that problem in his philosophy has these two opposite meanings. So we can say problem children is a term sort of euphemism that was invented for children that you would not want to live with. Whereas he is using it for something that you really ought to live with.

And a lot of people who are the survivors of doing unusual things and then advocate that people should do these unusual things, they often gloss over the difference between good discipline and bad discipline, good problem and bad problem. And they will say things that are exactly right for them because they were following the good path, if I can put it that way.

But it's often taken to mean that you have to knuckle down and do your chores and then your homework and then go to bed.

And that's the opposite of what you should be doing, even though it can be described in the same words. Yeah, there's this line from John Steinbeck, which is pretty fun. He says, I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction. And when doing a little bit of thinking about my golden retriever translation of your worldview en masse, civilizationally, across time, individually, existentially, it kind of I think that's that's probably that's not a bad summation.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction or you could say feel so much like destruction or is accused of being so much of destruction. Yes, the last one is perhaps the best because what it feels it Could feel either way, that's the trouble You can't really tell from the outside necessarily Because people can force themselves as well as being forced by other people And they can be pursuing a very hard path Which they want to pursue Which is joyful to them Without that being noticeable either The only time that that's noticeable The only times that that's noticeable Is when the thing they're pursuing happens to have a good reputation Like if somebody spends 10

hours a day Practicing chess Or practicing some martial art or whatever it is People will see what they're doing They are adopting the discipline And making themselves power through To being good at this thing Which society thinks is a good thing But a very similar thing like a video game Which is almost the same thing psychologically But which is socially frowned on People will say that's not a good thing to be devoting yourself to They will be blind to the effort and creativity that's going into it And they will instead try to apply discipline in the opposite direction

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books One is a textbook on quantum mechanics Quantum theory, rather Which I'm writing with Sam Kuypers and Chiara Maletto My colleagues Because we think that existing textbooks And existing ways of teaching

Quantum theory are just misconceived in many ways And we want to get it right So that's one thing Another thing is I'm writing the third book In my sort of sequel to my first two books Fabric of Reality and Beginning of Infinity I'm writing another one Very difficult I think it's an example of mountaineering Rather than being forced Taking the trash out But yeah But it's tentatively called Irrationality Though I don't quite like the title Because it gives the wrong impression At least at first The subtitle at the moment is

How thinking works And what the obstacles to it are

So that's I think a better title But it's a bit clunky And whilst doing textbook Plus difficult third album To previously quite complex initial two books You also got the fiction book put together as well Yes, I've also got my day job So apart from those three, yes Oh well, at least you're keeping yourself busy David Deutsch, ladies and gentlemen David, you're awesome I appreciate you It's very nice to hear a fellow accent as well What should people be looking out for Over the next couple of months? When is there something going to drop Before the end of the year? One of the books? One of the fiction books? Do we know when that's going to come out? I think that's unlikely

in the next couple of months But in the next year Fingers crossed Yes One of them may drop Beautiful David, I appreciate you very much Thank you for today Thank you for having me Very pleasant Mr. Monopoly here Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's With millions of prizes A 2027 cheap charity A Carnival Cruise vacation Gift cards from DoorDash And Best Buy He'll then play in the McDonald's app Get your bag No purchase necessary 50 US and DCH 18 plus See play at mcd .com for rules And play at mcd .com slash amoe For info and playing without purchase By mail by November 2nd Chance card game ends November 8th Game ends November 22nd, 2026 See rules for prize details

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