David Deutsch

David Deutsch says diversity is the key to a good life, and he does not think any formula applies to everybody, or even to any two people. Any two people are more different than we are really capable of understanding. Individual humans are as different from each other as humans in general are from other species. Every person is like a different species.

Some people like a life of intellectual problem solving. Deutsch points to a passage in Popper's autobiography. Popper says the thing to do in life is to find a problem, not fall in love with it, get married to it, and live with it for the rest of your life, until death do you part. If you happen to solve it, the tone is that you were unluck

Chris Williamson asks what a better approach is for somebody who wants to learn a lot from people who know a lot, and whether people should exit formal education as quickly as possible. Chris Williamson presumes the entire system cannot be upended right now immediately. David Deutsch says upending is outside his wheelhouse. He does not know how to formulate good political policies that will gain wide acceptance. Technically, he says, with the internet there are now the means of completely upending the system and not having any compulsory education, certainly for children.

David Deutsch says there are more and more ways of adapting university education to technologies like the internet and c

David Deutsch says education is judged by how well and how accurately you fill the bucket. Knowledge is the fluid, and by definition transferring it counts as success. Nothing can be wrong with the fluid, because the fluid is knowledge.

When something goes wrong, which it nearly always does, the conclusion is that the bucket is leaky or did not want to receive the fluid. Success is measured by exam results. In the arms race that follows in situations that are not rational, the incentive is to spend more and more time meeting the criterion and less and less time on things that cannot be measured, which are the important things. Chess shows the split. You can measure how good a grandmaster is

David Deutsch says creativity by itself is not an impressive thing. He uses the word to mean the ability to create new knowledge. Evolution is a creative process in that sense. It starts with an animal that cannot fly, and a few million years later it has created an animal that can fly, because its genes encode knowledge of how to fly.

Humans have explanatory creativity, which no existing other species has, although some species in the past had it. A person can say why one move is better than another. Deutsch describes the first person who invented a campfire, an idea he was writing about in his forthcoming book. The person picks up a burning branch from a wildfire to carry it, hoping preda

David Deutsch says use only the old theory and you will say AGI is impossible in that way. Know what we know and you will see why it is possible. The people expecting AGI are not making the claim. They say it will just happen with more compute, more computer power.

When chess engines first started defeating the best grandmasters, some people said machines would never do it because humans have a special thing in their brains. Others said it was just a matter of more computer power, and they had a theory of why more power was required. A chess engine and a grandmaster run radically different kinds of computation. The grandmaster does only like one millionth of the computation the chess engine

David Deutsch says fear of artificial intelligence is not a justified fear. He remembers people saying the same thing about nuclear reactors, loudly and often enough that societies stopped making nuclear reactors. He says that stop caused the present climate problem.

From his point of view, critics picked at random one of many bad things that could happen. They did not know whether a nuclear disaster would arrive, and there was no particular reason to think it would, even though it could. They alarmed everybody. People took drastic action to avoid the alarm, and the results were catastrophic. He calls the turn away from nuclear power the worst effect on the environment that our species has

David Deutsch says the Fermi problem is not the kind of problem he likes. We do not know whether we are alone in the universe. We might be or we might not be. It is easy to come up with explanations for why the aliens or their robots are not here yet, so the Fermi problem is a collision between one fantasy and another fantasy.

Chris Williamson asks what David Deutsch has come to believe about the Fermi problem. Deutsch says we do not know the answer. He also calls it the Fermi mystery, but it is not unusual, because we do not know most things. Problems he enjoys look as though something must be so and yet also look as though it cannot be so. Two claims appear to be in collision. Quantum gra

David Deutsch says people should aspire not to have any certainty. People should aspire to uncertainty. For a life of scientific research, it is highly desirable to enjoy the sensation of being baffled and of being in a state of conflict, when something looks true and still cannot be true. The sensation of being baffled is what attracts him to scientific research. He does not think one should even aspire to believe anything.

Belief, he says, is a corrupt kind of category that has come down from Plato and later from Christianity and Islam. Most religions do not value belief. They value ritual, conformity, and ways of life. Belief was something introduced by Christianity. Percy Shelley, in th

David Deutsch says people should look to correct errors and should not look for certainty. He quotes Popper, who says we are all alike in our infinite ignorance, and who says we may all know different things. An infinite distance remains. People hold different finite amounts of knowledge, so everyone is only ever at the beginning of infinity, and they have something in common with everyone else at the beginning. Holding oneself up as an authority is a philosophical mistake and a sociological or cultural mistake. It is a power play rather than a participation in the growth of knowledge.

Chris Williamson asks how a person can hold strong convictions while remembering they can be completely mi

David Deutsch agrees that whenever someone does not understand you, the fault is yours, not theirs, unless they are a golden retriever. He follows the philosopher Karl Popper, and he calls Popper's theory of knowledge streets ahead of everyone else in the 20th century.

Popper is very well known and highly respected. People put him on the list of the 10 top philosophers, and in science they talk about his criterion for distinguishing science from philosophy or from pseudoscience. His actual philosophy is not very well understood. One tenet is that there is only one way of creating knowledge. The details differ, but knowledge created by evolution, by a scientist, by a mathematician, and by a

Aravind Srinivas says Perplexity's brand is fundamentally to celebrate curiosity. He picked curiosity because he thinks it will be the only quality human beings can be proud of and lean into even more as AIs get better. He says you could argue that AI is the best accelerant of human curiosity, and almost the purpose of AI is to accelerate human curiosity.

Srinivas cites David Deutsch, the famous Oxford physicist, for the idea that human beings are the only species capable of being curious about what is already familiar. People might know something, look at it again, and think about it from a different perspective. Animals do not tend to do that. Srinivas says AIs can solve all the problems