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Could it really be okay to let kids eat whatever they want? Sleep whenever they want? Watch whatever they want? If kids are completely free to make their own choices, they’ll develop damaging habits that will haunt them into adulthood. Surely parents have a duty to set a few limits.

But what if this conventional wisdom is wrong? What if our deepest ideas of how learning works, how knowledge grows, and the nature of personhood all point to the brute fact that parenting philosophies have missed a critical detail?

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In The Sovereign Child, Aaron Stupple (with Logan Chipkin) explains Taking Children Seriously, the only parenting philosophy that accounts for the fact that children are people—their reasons, desires, emotions, and creativity all work precisely the same way that those of adults do. Because of this, much of the conventional wisdom simply cannot work as intended.

Using examples gleaned from his years as a father of five, Aaron takes a close look at the unavoidable harms of rule enforcement and the startling alternatives available when parents never give up on treating children as if their reasons for their choices matter as much as anyone else's.

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I

Due to Russia invading Ukraine, people seem to be more worried than usual about a nuclear war breaking out. I agree that it is definitely more likely that a nuclear war will happen tomorrow than it was, say, 4 months ago. However, the way people rationalize their fear is what I take issue with.

Their argument goes as follows. There is a certain probability (now higher because of the war between Russia and Ukraine) that a nuclear war will break out in any given year or on any given day. If we now iterate over enough years (or days) we will get a nuclear war with near certainty at some point. In other words, the cumulative probability of a nuclear war approaches 100% over time. The Gambler’s Ruin gets often used as an analogy for this scenario.

Here are two Tweets by Balaji as examples for what I am talking about, but rest assured that a lot of people have been arguing this way (tweet):

II

Alex Tabarrok recently published a short post talking about a survey of experts that estimate the annual probability of a nuclear war at 1.17%. Alex states:

For a child born today (say 75 year life expectancy) these probabilities (.0117) suggest that the chance of a nuclear war in their lifetime is nearly 60%, (1-(1-.0117)^75).

That is a very precise estimate. One is tempted to ask these experts why the probability is not closer to, say, 0.0121, but that is beside the point. Even Alex readily admits that these estimates are very unreliable by quoting the survey:

We shouldn’t put too much weight on these estimates, as each of the data points feeding into those estimates come with serious limitations.

The probability mentioned above is made up of expert guesses and “historical frequency.” I think discussing the latter is unnecessary as everyone should agree that war is the last topic we should expect the past to predict anything about the future. And for expert guesses, they are just that: guesses. We have, after all, not much evidence to look at.

This leads to a simple rule: for rare events, it is impossible to make a convincing case that one event is very unlikely (1 in 100.000), but not extremely unlikely (1 in 1.000.000) because, by the nature of rare events, there is not much data to base your estimates off.

Note also that if the probability estimate were correct, we would be lucky to be alive today. This might well be true, but I implore the reader to consider a different explanation: probabilities and the dice rolling analogy are inaccurate and useless when trying to predict these invents.

III

The deeper problem with trying to estimate these high impact low probability events is hinted at by Nick Szabo in his essay Pascal’s scams:

Poor evidence leads to what James Franklin calls "low-weight probabilities", which lack robustness to new evidence. When the evidence is poor, and thus robustness of probabilities is lacking, then it is likely that "a small amount of further evidence would substantially change the probability. "

Due to the very nature of rare events, we do not have much data about them and not much confidence in our estimates. New evidence can therefore shift our probabilities drastically.

If you would ask the expert of the 2019 survey cited above about their probabilities again today, we would naturally get higher estimates, and they would be “correct.” But the same thing could happen in the other direction: Russia conquers Ukraine, sanctions are imposed, and the military situation calms down. Now the probability of a nuclear war is lower.

As you can see, not only is your current probability estimate unreliable to the point of uselessness, but you cannot make any meaningful predictions about the future because new evidence will drastically alter your estimate. This deep epistemological limitation is a consequence of the inherent unpredictability of the future and unfortunately cannot be overcome.

Put differently, Putin does not roll a dice every morning and launches a nuclear missile if a six shows up. Even he himself cannot meaningfully answer the question “What’s the probability that Russia will launch nuclear missiles 6 months from now” unless his answer is 100%. It depends on many factors, like how NATO reacts and how strong the Ukraine military is, none of which can be captured by probabilities.

The dice rolling analogy makes it seem like we cannot influence the future and our actions are independent of the “probabilities”; it makes it seem like at some point we are going to blow ourselves up anyway, no matter how low the probability on any given day. That is simply wrong and the worst kind of pessimism in the Deutschian sense.

IV

The future is shaped by what we humans do today, which cannot be captured by probabilities or predicted to any significant degree – especially for rare events. If we are alive 500 years from now, it does not mean the probability estimates were wrong, but that we have successfully managed to negotiate a solution without nuclear war. Putting a probability on that is simply meaningless.

More precisely, the probability expresses nothing fundamental about the situation; rather, the probability expresses the expert’s uncertainty and lack of information about the future. For deterministic high probability events, this may still be useful, but otherwise, it becomes a useless exercise.

Let us look at a simpler example, weather forecasting, to better understand what probability even means in our context. When we say, “There is a 75% chance it will rain tomorrow in NYC,” that probability does not correspond to anything in nature. In other words, the weather is not unsure if it is going to rain tomorrow; it either is or is not going to rain, but it is not up to chance – it is already “fixed” because the weather is fully deterministic – chaos theory notwithstanding. We just do not know it. The probability of 75% concerns our uncertainty and our knowledge about the system, not the system itself. This might seem like a small semantic quibble but it is not. We could calculate a different and more precise probability for the rain tomorrow if we had a better model or better input data even though the weather itself remains unchanged.

When predicting nuclear war, the situation is even worse because humans are involved and they are neither deterministic nor predictable. (I am trying to avoid a philosophical discussion about free will here as it is irrelevant to my argument. Even if people had no free will and everything was deterministic, we could not predict any significant action or decision, and it would therefore be as if people had free will.)

When people talk about the probability of nuclear war they’re talking about their knowledge and uncertainty of an outcome that is, in contrast to weather forecasting, not fixed, but completely open. The estimated probability is therefore simply useless – or in other words, bullshit.

V

Realizing that we can shape the future and it is not nearly certain that we blow ourselves up at some point because of “the nuclear gambler’s ruin” is a hopeful and deeply optimistic message in the Deutschian sense. It does not mean we will prevent nuclear war; it simply means that if we take the right action we can stage off a disaster indefinitely, and I hope we do.

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News and Tweets

• Crémieux on GDP growth:

  

• An Unfiltered Conversation with Jordan Peterson (endorses Libertarianism)

  • Excerpt:

• Arena Magazine launched

  • A new magazine by Maxwell Meyer (Editor at 8vc)

  • arenamag.com

  • Podcast

• Michael Nielsen and David Deutsch discuss “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich”

  

• Thousands of Years Later, Price Controls Are Still a Bad Idea 

• “Experts” means democrat: Tweet by Balaji

  

  

• 9/11 serves as a reminder of heroism and bravery in the face of extreme adversity and evil. Consider reading about Todd Beamer, passenger of one of the hijacked flights who, along with other passengers, attacked the terrorists to regain control of the plane. His last known words were ‘let’s roll’.

• 9/11 memorial at night (image by David Kedmey):

  

Interesting Links

• yogurrt.com is a cool website to find book recommendations (including ones about Critical Rationalism-related topics).

• Popper dreamed of anarchism:

• #34 - Sentience, with Walter Veit, Dennis Hackethal, and Matt Guttman

• Applying Deutsch's concept of good explanations to artificial intelligence and neuroscience -- an initial exploration: paper

• The Foolish: Haidt’s Draconian Appeal, by Aaron Stupple in The Sovereign Gazette

• Transaction Cost and Risk Elimination: Lessons from Thiel, Rabois, Bezos, and Khosla (by Moritz Wallawitsch - shameless plug)

Book we liked

• Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle: An incredible story of perseverance, decentralized bottoms-up organisation, a culture of criticism and ingenuity. In just a few decades a small group of people created immense value, creating one of the richest countries on earth.

• Galileo’s Finger by Peter Atkins: High-level coverage of some important chapters in the history of science, including biology, chemistry, and particle physics.

[T]here is something obscene in the attitude of those […] who are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless victims, but march in protest against wars between the well-armed.

— Ayn Rand. ‘The Roots of War.’ Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (p. 39). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Wikipedia defines pacifism (links and formatting removed):

Pacifism is the opposition or resistance to war, militarism […] or violence.

The same article elaborates (links and footnotes removed, italics mine):

Historians of pacifism Peter Brock and Thomas Paul Socknat define pacifism “in the sense generally accepted in English-speaking areas” as “an unconditional rejection of all forms of warfare”. Philosopher Jenny Teichman defines the main form of pacifism as “anti-warism”, the rejection of all forms of warfare.

Wikipedia also includes as pacifist stances the “the obliteration of force, and opposition to violence under any circumstance, even defence of self and others.”

In violent conflicts, there’s usually an aggressor and a victim. The aggressor initiates violence against the victim, who may in turn use retaliatory violence to defend himself. Think of a robber and the robbed, or a murderer and his victim.

Note that the above definitions reject all forms of violence unconditionally, including defensive, ie retaliatory force. That means a defining attribute of pacifism is that it does not differentiate between aggressive and defensive force but condemns both. This lack of nuance makes pacifism worse than worthless – it favors aggressors.

Condemning both the aggressor and the victim for their use of violence is the mirror image of moral agnosticism. Where moral agnostics equally refuse to judge good and evil, pacifists judge the two sides the same. Pacifists will grant that an aggressor is wrong to use violence to begin with, but they will also condemn the victim for using violence to defend himself.

In other words, pacifists do pronounce judgment, but their pronouncement is unjust: evil does not deserve the same judgment as good; while the robber and murderer deserve condemnation, their victims do not; aggressive force is different from defensive force.

I don’t know which is worse – moral agnostics’ refusal to identify evil as evil, or pacifists’ attempt to place good and evil on an even moral footing – but the outcome in both cases is injustice. Both favor evil over good. While moral agnostics favor evil by default, as Ayn Rand explains, pacifists favor evil by condemning the good the same and actively denying it the means of defense.

An example of pacifism in present-day international relations is the reaction of some to Israel’s defense against Hamas’s genocidal attempt to eradicate the Jews. It’s not the case that the ‘pacifists’ protesting against Israel want good to triumph over evil while merely being mistaken about who is which. And it’s not true that these ‘pacifists’ want peace – if they did, they’d advocate a swift victory for Israel. No, they feel an unidentified uneasiness at the sight of good having the gall to stand up against evil. Pacifists do not want good to have the ability to defend itself against evil.

An historical (though ever-present) example of pacifism is the opposition to the development of the atomic bomb. The bomb provided a clear way for good to swiftly and decisively triumph over evil. As Mike Coté argues, “Dropping the Atomic Bombs Was Good, Actually”. Another historical example is the pacifist call to mutual disarmament between the Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War. Which side do you think would cheat and keep their weapons, and which would honor the agreement and be left without means of defense? In this regard, pacifism is not even internally consistent: mutual disarmament would need to be enforced somehow. With what? In the limit, with guns.

Bans on guns are a domestic example of pacifism. As opponents have argued, these bans favor violent criminals by disarming law-abiding citizens and robbing them of their ability to defend themselves effectively. What do you think happens when you ask both a murderer and his victim to put down their weapons? Conversely, advocates of gun bans do not actually want to ban guns: they want evil – in this case, government, as libertarians commonly point out – to have all the guns. The same internal inconsistency applies: a ban on guns would need to be enforced somehow, with guns if necessary.

Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps the best-known pacifist to have ever lived, said in an interview with his biographer (brackets mine, links removed):

[The holocaust] is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

— Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, jewishvirtuallibrary.org

Once aroused, what could the people of Germany and the world have done without weapons? Absolutely nothing. Gandhi’s stance, including thinking of Jews as lemmings rather than people, is disgusting; he may as well have held the butcher’s knife he spoke of.

Europeans still have not learned one of the key lessons of WW2 and the holocaust: that disarming the general populace paves the way for an evil government to enslave and murder good citizens. Politely asking Genghis Khan to stop killing people is pointless. Civilization requires weapons in the hands of good people; peace cannot be brought about by trying to disarm everyone. The proper response for any Jew who had the means and ability to fight the Nazis would have been to arm himself to the teeth and shoot Nazis on sight.

Ayn Rand writes:

[U]nilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression.

— Ayn Rand. ‘The Roots of War.’ Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (p. 36). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Many people still have not grasped this truth. In a world where evil exists, or might exist, pacifism is always unilateral; it’s always an invitation to aggression. Rand also writes:

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

— Ayn Rand. ‘The Nature of Government.’ The Virtue of Selfishness, books.apple.com

Whether they realize it or not, pacifists don’t recognize man’s right to life. They don’t want peace – on the contrary, as is evident in Gandhi’s quote above, pacifists want bloodshed. A world without weapons, without borders, means carnage.

There are bad wars, but not all war is bad. Defensive violence is good because aggressive violence is bad. If you want to live in a world where good has a chance against evil, where peace can triumph over war, you need to differentiate.

There are ‘pacifists’ who take a more reasonable stance and ‘allow’ retaliatory force, though not without hesitation. Thus, they advocate a form of ‘pacifism’ that is so diluted as to be meaningless, while still reaping the social status of being goody two-shoes. When peaceable, legal means of resistance such as non-violent protests effectively combat evil, I agree they should be preferred – but almost everybody already thinks that anyway. And, when in doubt, pacifist hesitation still affords evil a crucial advantage. Good is typically already hesitant to use weapons for self-defense, whereas evil has no such reservations and is happy to use violence to achieve its ends. So even ‘limited’ pacifism has a stifling effect on good and an encouraging effect on evil. Rand also writes:

[T]he partial victory of an unjust claim encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim discourages and paralyzes the victim.

— Ayn Rand. ‘The Cashing-In: The Student “Rebellion.”’ Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (p. 290). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

That is precisely the stifling effect even ‘limited’ pacifism has. Good must be locked and loaded if it is to triumph over evil.

I’ve always shuddered at the sight of hippies who, never having outgrown a teenage girl’s politics, wield the peace sign. But I wasn’t always able to make that emotion explicit. Now I am: it’s disgust over the injustice and hypocrisy of pacifism.

The question is not whether the peaceful protests in East Germany that contributed to the fall of the evil, socialist regime should have turned violent unnecessarily – of course they shouldn’t have. The question is whether something like the massacre at Tiananmen Square could have been prevented if peaceable citizens hadn’t been disarmed in the first place. The question isn’t whether diplomacy should be preferred over violence – of course it should be. The question is whether good should be able to defend itself when evil has already chosen violence.

My answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

If you like us to (re-)publish your work or you have suggestions for the next “links” section you can simply reply to this email or dm us on X.

Links

Economics

• Libertarianism Under Scrutiny by Sam Kuypers. Tackles common objections and offers insights on market failures, government inefficiencies, and the nuances of anarcho-capitalism.

• The Nature of the Firm by R. H. Coase. Highlights the differences between firms and markets, the cost of using the price mechanism, and the crucial role of the entrepreneur.

• Evictionism is a moral theory advanced by Walter Block and Roy Whitehead on a proposed libertarian view of abortion based on property rights. Also see J. C. Lester’s paper Abortion and Infanticide: a Radical Libertarian Defence.

• Humanities declining fertility rate is problematic. Check out the section on Our World in Data and the List of Countries by total Fertility rate on Wikipedia.

• Elon Musk followed David Deutsch. (The world's richest man started following the most impactful philosopher of our generation).

Book recommendations

• History: The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman explores how the philosophical rivalry between Plato and Aristotle has shaped the foundations and enduring features of Western culture.

• Physics: Quanta and Fields: The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll delves into the profound nature of reality through quantum field theory, offering an accessible yet deep exploration of modern physics' most fundamental concepts.

• Epistemology/Philosophy/Computer Science: A Window on Intelligence: The Philosophy of People, Software, and Evolution – And Its Implications by Dennis Hackethal. It describes the challenges and potential solutions in simulating human intelligence, proposing a unified approach to software engineering and reasoning to unlock the unlimited potential of artificial general intelligence.

• Morality: The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley explores how human cooperative instincts have evolved from natural selfish behavior, revealing through interdisciplinary studies that self-interest and mutual aid are fundamentally compatible.

• Economics/History: Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better by Lyn Alden. The book examines the technological evolution of money, its impact on society, and explores how emerging technologies could improve the global monetary system for the modern era.

However, religions can also lead to the suppression of freedom and criticism.

How Religions Spread

Strategies

Now let’s look at the most common religions through this lens of virology. First of all, all religions employ these strategies to spread:

• Moral framework: They offer useful guidance as to  which behavior is encouraged and which is prohibited. Historically, they fostered a decentralized form of jurisdiction before institutionalized control of violence was invented or available. In Islam, this framework is called Sharia Law.

• Mutation: Religions spread by mutating to adapt to the current moral knowledge and cultural norms of a society. For instance, usury came to be defined as “excessive interest”. Almost 25% of marriages within the Christian faith end in divorce, even though Jesus forbids it.

• Child-age instruction: Children are more susceptible to accepting ideas they are told by authorities, as their ability to criticize theories is still developing.

• Political influence-seeking: Sir Arthur C. Clark wrote: "It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” Similarly, ever since Mohammed's initial conquests, his was a political religion. Another example is the Christian Orthodox religion dominating the Russian government, which banned Protestant Churches like the Jehovah’s Witnesses from Moscow. Even America, though its constitution limits the role of religion in the government (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), is united by a Protestant-theology-inspired American Civil Religion. The motto “In God We Trust” provides spiritual backing for the currency. The pledge of allegiance recited by schoolchildren describes the republic as “one nation united under God”.  

• Controlling fertility: The rate of reproduction is a critical parameter of existence, especially among primitive societies, and religions are a potent means of regulating fertility. Religious practice usually causes an increase in fertility. Having too few people makes a group vulnerable to attack from more populous neighbors.

• Guilt: Because many religions prohibit certain behaviors, when a person violates these prohibitions, they are made to feel guilty. This brings the person even closer to their religion.

Christianity

• Priests and Monks: They are forbidden from having children so that they may maintain focus on propagating the religion. This is genetic suicide for the priest's genes but serves the virus that is Catholic religion.

• Funding: Christianity encourages donating to the church, i.e. to institutions that spread and fortify the religion. 

• Financial aid with caveats: Christian institutions often offer a number of supporting services for the poor, such as homeless shelter, medical aid, or education. However, these services are usually only available for people that are already part of, or are willing to join, the religion.

• Evangelism: Christianity places a strong emphasis on evangelism, or spreading the faith to non-believers, which helps propagate the religion.

• Science: Societies that focus on knowledge creation prosper and proliferate. So does their religion. In Ecclesiasticus 42:21, it is written that “[God] has imposed an order on the magnificent works of his wisdom.” This and other passages gave Catholic scientists faith that God had created an explainable, quantifiable universe. Investigation into the workings of reality became a spiritual endeavor. More on this in Logan’s piece, Did the Catholic Church Give Birth to Science?

Islam

• Punishing apostates: the extreme form of this is “honor killing”. (Honor killings are also common for gay people in Palestine).

• Arabic Language: The use of Arabic in prayers and religious texts creates a sense of unity among Muslims worldwide, regardless of their native language.

• Jihad: This term appears frequently in the Quran and in the Hadith. While modernist Islamic scholars have emphasized the defensive and non-military (spiritual and moral) aspects of jihad, in classical Islamic law (sharia), the term refers to armed struggle against unbelievers. Of the 199 hadith references to jihad in the Bukhari collection of hadith, all assume that jihad means warfare.

• Limiting rights of woman: Women have fewer rights and less worth according to traditional Quran interpretations. Limiting their rights, including their education, reduces their ability to criticize their oppressors.

• Woman hair-display & fertility control: Long hair is a strong signal of health and fertility1. The mandate for women to wear a hijab in the in presence of non-related men might have originated to limit woman’s ability to advertise their sexuality. Secondly, Traditional Sunni and Shia Islamic marital jurisprudence allows Muslim men to be married to multiple women (a practice known as polygyny). This, together with additional encouragement by Islamic religious teachings, could have led to a higher fertility rate of 3.1 children per woman, increasing the spread of the religion.

  

  For comparison, Christians have a fertility rate of 2.7 children per woman. While the global average is just 2.5.

  

Judaism

• Vertical Distribution: Judaism is less open to converts. This can be a successful strategy because the community keeps the virus strong and, in turn, the virus binds the community closely together.

• Rituals: Judaism, like other religions, has many rituals including dietary laws, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, and Sabbath observance. These solidify the community members’ commitment to their faith.

• Questioning: Similar to the Catholic belief of an explicable and ordered nature, Judaism comes with a culture of questioning existing knowledge. The phrase “How do we know this?” appears frequently in Rabbinic literature. Rabbis always had to explain their reasoning.

The Best Religion

Subjectivism, i.e. the belief that there is no objective reality, is wrong. That means that there must be objective truth about the benefits and downsides of a certain religion, given a specific goal. 

But what do we want? Moral knowledge is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for.

Karl Popper and David Deutsch have hypothesized that the most fundamental moral truth is to not destroy the means of error correction (the moral imperative).  

What kind of Errors? Examples include: bad leaders like dictators that kill civilians, the suppression or degradation of human rights and freedom of 50% of society (including legitimizing rape), forbidding a certain productive behavior like collecting interest. 

I conjecture that the worst religion is the one that is most successful in removing the means of error correction.  

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Links

On The Israel-Palestine Conflict & Deutsch’s Pattern

• YouTuber Hananya Naftali about the Israel-Gaza Border and the alleged Genocide in Gaza

• Antisemitism in Britain - An Interview With David Deutsch

• License to Harm: Deutsch’s Pattern and the Longue Durée of Antisemitism

• With the Zionists in Gallipoli (Book)

• The Pattern in the 21st Century: What, How, Why? (Online course by Landes and Deutsch)

• This Ramadan, Remember to Take Jihadists Seriously

• Jordan Peterson EDUCATES Piers Morgan Israel Hamas War

Book Recommendations

• Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire : Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain why We Do what We Do

Many of the ideas in this above essay came from these two books:

• The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

• The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture

General News

• Arjun Interviews David Deutsch

• Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World (Economist Walter Williams on why the media ignores Thomas Sowell’s work)

• Javier Milei: The Movie - Pandenomics

• White House Senior Living Advertisement (shared by Donald Trump)

What’s next

Between March 2022 and May 2023 we released 9 episodes of our newsletter. This episode will be the beginning of a new era for Critical Rationalism News. We all got pretty busy with various projects, but will re-commit to a regular monthly released cadence.

If you want us to highlight your article, or you have suggestions for upcoming newsletters, please email us your suggestions at criticalrationalism@substack.com (you can reply to this email).

What we wrote recently

Economics: A Universal Acid

Explore the fascinating parallels between the universality of Darwin's theory of evolution and the principles of Austrian economics, as we delve into the debate around accepting these ideas' comprehensive applicability to all biological entities and economic sectors respectively, challenging conventional wisdom and potentially reshaping our understanding of the world.

The Bioenergetic Explanation of Health

What is your definition of health? Health, a concept often defined by the absence of disease, is more accurately a state of unburdened and actualized physiological function. The quest for health, akin to the pursuit of truth, requires explanations that are hard to vary, as proposed by physicist David Deutsch.

The Constraints of Money

Constraints, often viewed as limitations, are in fact catalysts for progress, evident in fields like science and poetry. This intriguing concept is applied to money, demonstrating how it, as a constraint, revolutionized trade by solving the 'double coincidence of wants' problem in barter systems, and facilitated efficient resource allocation through price signals. However, the manipulation of this constraint (money supply) has caused issues, promoting the need for an unmanipulatable medium - Bitcoin.

Startup Ideas: Exploration & Evaluation

This article delves into the epistemology of startup ideas, exploring the intersection of knowledge and innovation. It unpacks the mechanics of problem-solving and the untapped potential of secrets and market trends. The post summarizes 50+ blog posts and podcasts on this and related topics by the world's most successful founders and VCs.

The Religion of Science

Science, while a revered source of knowledge, is often misused as a shield against criticism, with policymakers invoking its authority to silence debate; yet, true science is about continuous questioning, and while it can explain how the world works, it can't dictate the choices we make, emphasizing the crucial role of human ingenuity in transforming our understanding of the world.

Great Newsletters

Tom of Letters

• Slavery Is Bad For Business—The foundational myth of servitude is economic as well as historical

• Another Sun Rises—The dawn of fusion power is now.

• Eight Billion Reasons to Celebrate—Why a larger population is a radically good thing

Sam’s Newsletter

• Dissecting Discontent—How Incel Ideology Mirrors Socialist Thought

• Getting an 'ought' from an 'is'—A connection between fallibilism and morality

• The morality of immortality—Answering ChatGPT's objections to human immortality

Fallible Pieces

• Hidden-in-Plain-Sight Ideas

• Gish Gallops, Conspiracies, and Refutations as Anti-Rational Memes

• Organizing the conflicts with Deutsch and rationalism

You can find more resources at criticalrationalism.org.

Looking back

We want to take a moment to highlight some of the introductory essays of our previous posts. It might be worth reading these again. We included a mini summary for every essay.

Why ChatGPT isn't a step towards AGI

Unravel the fascinating dichotomy between AI like ChatGPT and the elusive artificial general intelligence (AGI) in this newsletter, exploring the philosophical barrier of creativity, the misunderstanding of learning, and the potential of AGI to be as dangerous—and wonderful—as humans.

Why altruism is evil

Exploring the tension between altruism and progress, this piece argues that our inability to predict future knowledge makes it impossible to accurately cater for the needs of future generations. It suggests that focusing on individual growth and problem-solving, rather than imposing our present values on future generations, may lead to a more beneficial future for all.

Why the Growth of Wealth is not Enough

This piece explores the relationship between wealth and morality in the context of free market capitalism, arguing that wealth is not just material but also consists of transformative knowledge. It suggests that moral knowledge, which guides our decisions on which transformations to pursue, is essential in our understanding of progress, hinting at a deeper interconnectedness between wealth and morality.

Why Shaming Can't Work

This piece scrutinizes the use of shaming as a tool for persuasion, arguing that it is not only ineffective but also potentially harmful. It explains that genuine persuasion requires argument and understanding, and that societal acceptance of shaming could lead to a culture where everyone shames and no one learns, making it a precarious strategy for any ideology.

Contra Doomer

Challenging the notion of superintelligence as a threat, this article uses epistemology to argue that a true AGI would be capable of doubt, learning, and aligning with human values, thereby reducing the perceived existential risk and offering a fascinating exploration of artificial consciousness.

On the derangements of science

This thought-provoking piece challenges traditional views of science, asserting that it is not a cold, emotionless practice, nor a final authority on truth. It underscores the importance of creativity, conjecture, and criticism in the knowledge-creation process, while warning against the dangers of dogmatism and authoritarianism in science, ultimately urging an open-minded approach that embraces the inevitability of mistakes.

Do Not Fear Automation

Exploring the fear of automation-induced unemployment, this article argues that technologies like ChatGPT won't cause joblessness, but rather empower us to achieve more. Drawing on historical examples, it maintains that while some jobs may become obsolete, technological progress invariably creates new opportunities, boosts living standards, and opens pathways to solutions previously unimagined, thereby driving humanity towards an end to poverty.

Wealth-creation is righteous

This essay challenges the notion that wealth is finite, arguing that wealth creation, driven by the growth of knowledge, brings something new into the world and contributes to societal abundance. It posits that entrepreneurs, not governments, are the real agents of progress and advocates for freedom as the key to solving pressing global issues, thus inviting readers to reconsider their views on wealth, knowledge, and progress.

By definition, wealth-creation brings something into the world that didn't exist before. By creating wealth, you grow the pie, rather than take from it. Steve Jobs became a billionaire not by stealing but by creating real value. This contradicts the idea that rich people have a moral obligation to “give back” to society. They didn't take anything from anyone. Rather, the richest people—the ones who create the most value—give the world more abundance and prosperity than anyone else, and get fairly rewarded for it.

Wealth and knowledge

The amount of wealth in the world is not stagnant. It grows as we increase the number of physical transformations we can cause. To cause certain physical transformations, we must discover the knowledge of how to do so. There's a deep connection between wealth and knowledge. The growth of knowledge fuels the growth of wealth. It is impossible to predict the growth of knowledge because if you could predict it, you would have created the knowledge already.

“Wealth grows in magic ways. No man can prophesy the limit of it.”

— George S. Clayson, The Richest Man in Babylon

Clayson is right about the unboundedness of wealth-creation. Since knowledge-creation, a prerequisite for wealth-creation, is inherently unpredictable, no one can prophesy the growth of wealth. Luckily though, there’s nothing mysterious about the growth of wealth. We know that there are certain circumstances under which wealth-creation is unlikely, if not virtually impossible. Authoritarian regimes under which everything is “planned” come to mind—in which there's distribution instead of creation of wealth.

Pessimists have long argued that if we continue on our trajectory, doom is inevitable. Their prophecies cannot possibly take the growth of knowledge into account. But only knowledge will enable us to solve the problems that could lead to our doom. Nevertheless, the pessimists argue for regulation, for coercive intervention. They argue for the very kind of thing that will suppress creativity and the growth of knowledge. The pessimists argue for ways to cause our doom.

An objectively better place

“Who benefited more from the iPhone, a billionaire or me?
I can talk to my kids from all over the world at a cost of nothing.
I have every piece of music ever written in my pocket.
Steve Jobs made this possible for me.
And you tell me the billionaires EXPLOIT us?”

— Yaron Brook

Governments distribute wealth, taking it away from where progress is happening fastest and gifting it to where it’s not. Entrepreneurs create wealth. These are the ones who are actually making the world a better place. The average American today is in fact incalculably richer than John D. Rockefeller. 100 years ago, no amount of money could have bought the richest man in the world an iPhone. As Barack Obama said, “If you had to choose a moment in history to be born... you’d choose now.”

Progress and wealth-creation—which has to include the growth of knowledge—let us solve problems that arise inevitably. If we slow down wealth-creation, we may not be able to solve our most pressing problems in time. People create wealth when they are free to respond to problems they find interesting. This is what the world needs to create more wealth and to save itself from doom. Freedom.

In a previous newsletter, Logan Chipkin explains why the growth of wealth is not enough. Knowledge of how to transform the world tells us nothing about which transformations we ought to pursue. For that, we need moral knowledge—knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for. You can read it here.

Critical Finds

• Reason Is Fun podcast by Lulie Tanett with David Deutsch. Listen to the latest episode on the “Fun Criterion” here.

• How to Get Rich by Naval Ravikant.

• GPT-4 Prompt Tries To Generate Fundamentally New Knowledge. We don’t think these outputs represent fundamentally new knowledge, as large language models create these inferences via induction (they interpolate between a dense manifold of training data). But one might argue that the connections they make are novel. The hard to vary explanation prompt is certainly useful for users of ChatGPT and other LLM tools.

• Peter Thiel on monopolies in Zero to One

  In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector [...] But the world we live in is dynamic: it’s possible to invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.

  Also see Brett Hall’s summary of The Beginning of Infinity Ch 15 "The Evolution of Culture”

What We’re Reading

• Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

• Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

  • A quote that stuck out from the book:

    “It is by no means obvious why we should prefer trying to equalize incomes to putting our efforts into increasing output. People in general and the poor in particular seem to ‘vote with their feet’ by moving to where there is greater prosperity, rather than where there is greater economic equality. Rising standards of living, especially for those at the bottom economically, have resulted not so much from changing the relative sizes of different slices of the economic pie, as from increasing the size of the pie itself — which has largely been accomplished without requiring heavy rhetoric, fierce emotions, or bloodshed.
    
    Does it not matter if the hungry are fed, if slums are replaced by decent and air-conditioned housing, if infant mortality rates are reduced to less than a tenth of what they were before? Are invidious ‘gaps’ and ‘disparities’ all that matter? In a world where we are all beneficiaries of enormous windfall gains that our forbearers never had, are we to tear the society that created all this apart because some people’s windfall gains are greater or less than some other people’s windfall gains?”

Written by Arjun Khemani.

Edited by Logan Chipkin and .

Image by Gal Barkan.

Around 3000 BCE, written language emerged for the first time in human history. The rise of city-states fostered an ever-growing economy (and vice versa), and people could no longer maintain transactional records solely in their minds. Economic progress could have halted unless someone found a way to solve the problem of our limited memory. And so writing was born–birthed as a solution to a problem, a pathway to progress.

There is much anxiety around automation, understandably so. In the modern economy, humans are employed to the extent that the job at hand requires manual labor, cognitive ability, or both. Since human labor comes at the cost of wages, employer demand for automating said labor is inevitable. 

‘Computers’ used to be people who ran calculations with pen and paper. Then a device was invented that could perform the same tasks far more productively than its human counterparts ever could. Those individuals who had previously been valuable as workers found themselves unemployed. From their perspective, the invention of the modern computer was a negative. If they could have mandated their continual employment, they would have. 

The same goes for the farmer, the milkman, and the elevator operator. Every employee has a financial interest in maintaining his job, whatever the cost to society. Imagine if the computers had gotten their way–a victory for a minority, and a devastating stagnation for all of society.

One issue of the anti-automation movement is that the decision of which technologies should be forbidden from being invented is arbitrary. To satisfy every worker is to freeze the economy, preventing our standard of living from rising, preventing problems from being solved. 

Few white-collar workers would ever switch to physical labor. The very existence of their positions is a result of past technological progress that had automated more and more manual labor, until people were free and wealthy enough to satisfy cognitive demands, such as marketing, banking, and teaching.

People often emphasize the perils of automation, such as potential mass unemployment. But rarely do they weigh these against the benefits. Reduction in production costs frees up scarce resources to be employed towards previously unaffordable ends, and so everyone becomes wealthier. 

When imagining a world without employment, one sometimes projects the current economic paradigm onto the would-be jobless. This is a parochial error. Those disparaging technological progress must, if they are to give a fair assessment of the problem, take into account the vast increase in purchasing power that will benefit the poorest member of society in such a hypothetical future. Taken to the limit, products will eventually cost no more than the raw materials needed to make them.

As seen with the computer, technologies are almost always employed towards ends that their original creators had never anticipated. Many anti-automation advocates claim that they care about the trash man, the IT assistant, the truck driver. They must concede that by protecting their jobs, they are not only preventing living standards from rising, but that they are also preventing paths to solutions no one has ever even considered yet.

It may be that the life of a middle-class American today is the life of the most impoverished tomorrow. In fact, this is already the trend, and has been since humanity’s first innovation. The fastest route to the end of poverty is innovation. To sacrifice potential prosperity for the sake of short-term concerns of a minority is to relinquish the only tool that has ever succeeded in solving problems.

Books

• How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time by Matt Ridley

• The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment by Kate Distin

In the News

• Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) discussion on The Beginning of Infinity on Twitter

Videos and Audio

• Fossil Future: The Time for Optimism is Now - EP 42 - Alex Epstein & Peter Thiel

• Discussion about Freedom, Violence, and Law Enforcement, and negative externalities on AirChat with Naval, Moritz, Keith, Aaron, and more.

Articles on AI Automation

• Cognition Augmentation Software (and automating cognition) by Moritz

• Technology Creates Jobs as Much as It Destroys Them - Matt Ridley

• Even the Man of Steel has Limits by Audacious Denizen

• Vinod Khosla on how AI will ‘free humanity from the need to work’

Written by Logan Chipkin.

Edited by .

Image by Amaro Koberle.

Some think of science as a cold, inhuman, and logical practice of dealing with the “facts of reality”. Meanwhile, some “believe in science” and think of it somewhat akin to the final word of God.

Both those views are wrong, and for similar reasons: they share a fundamental misconception about science and knowledge-creation.

The idea that truth is manifest—that people can discover it by observing reality “as it is”—is false.

Observation isn’t a source of knowledge. 

For a long time, it was believed that the Earth was at the center of the Universe and that the Sun and the other planets revolved around it.

Then in the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus, who is widely recognized as the man who caused the Scientific Revolution, forever changed the way humans viewed the world. His thesis was that the Earth moves around the Sun.

But how did Copernicus go out and observe what came to be this “fact of reality”? Why did it take so long for someone to understand where the Earth stood with respect to the sun and other planets if all one has to do in order to understand the world is “observe”?

In reality, Copernicus made a guess. He took a leap of imagination. Creativity is as crucial an element in science as it is in art and every other human endeavor. Without it, we would be just another species that left traces of what it was, not what it created.

Art and science are very much alike in this way. Science is not cold and devoid of emotion. It is not a way of assembling the facts and making calculations all day. Indeed, the act of making tedious calculations is a part of the scientist’s life. But so are some mundane tasks of the artist’s.

All knowledge-creation, from scientific to moral, happens in the same way. And it does not begin with observation. It begins with a problem. Then a guess is made at solving the problem. And that guess is then criticized or tested against reality.

This is the purpose of observation: to criticize. It is to testify against a theory (or guess). Not to verify, but to falsify. For no amount of repeated observations can logically verify a theory. But you only need one instance of evidence contradicting your theory to refute it or at least render it problematic. No matter how many white swans you see, you cannot prove that “All swans are white”. But with the evidence of a single black swan, you can refute the theory that “All swans are white”.

Observation is crucial in the growth of scientific knowledge. But it isn’t significant in the same way as it traditionally has been thought of by empiricists or inductivists. The empiricist thinks one can get a hold of the facts by simply observing nature, ridding oneself of any theories or biases. The inductivist thinks that repeated observations increase one’s certitude.

These are both ways of attributing authority to observation. And, as we’ll see, they are as dangerous to progress and civilization as was the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

In actuality, the creation of knowledge begins with a problem and a conjecture—typically a bold one. Observation is then interpreted in the light of some theory. Without some theory in hand, the observation could not possibly bear any fruit.

When all but one theory is criticized and falsified by observation and experiment, we adopt that theory as our current best explanation on the matter. This knowledge is not factual. It contains error. It is conjectural in nature. It shouldn’t be considered the final word or the “fact of reality”. Newton’s theory was overturned by Einstein’s general relativity after centuries of being unchallenged. Newton’s theory never was a “fact of reality”. Nor is Einstein’s. We shouldn’t expect Einstein’s theory to hold true in another 200 years (if the enemies of civilization don’t get their way). Scientists are constantly looking to refute Einstein’s theory—as they should with any theory, for that is the ultimate fate of all theories: their falsification.

All theories are error-laden, and all people—including scientists—are fallible. In our modern world, it is troubling to see the title “science” serving as a cloak, underneath which is dogmatism. What started off as an escape from authority is now tending towards the very kind of thing it escaped from. “Believe the science,” they say.

The idea that we should defer the responsibility for making the decisions of our society to a few scientists who have an apparent authority on what’s true is tyranny. Authoritarianism in science is heavily ironic. “Belief in science” is an oxymoron, not a creed.

As my friend pointed out to me recently, there’s authoritarianism in science, and then there's scientistic authoritarianism. Those who say, “If you disagree with X policy/course of action, you're against science!” fall into this category.

The idea that mistakes might not be made by the right kind of person (i.e., who has gone through the right training or holds particular views or whatever) is mistaken. It is leaving knowledge to authority. A recipe for tyranny. A dangerous trap.

Mistakes are inevitable. They are like the rung of the ladder that isn’t meant to be rested upon. But only meant to support one’s foot long enough to enable a person to put the other foot somewhat higher. Mistakes ought to be intentionally identified and corrected. But for this, one must admit the possibility of making mistakes. One must accept there is a problem to solve.

Critical Finds

• Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant interview David Deutsch about the fabric of reality, AGI and the importance of disobedience, wealth and the growth of knowledge, and much more!

  • Mentioned in the podcast are Logan Chipkin’s interviews with Chiara Marletto and other physicists working on constructor theory which serve as a great introduction to the theory.

• A blog about utility monsters and the impossibility of comparing absolute levels of utility by Sam Kuypers.

• The most dangerous monopoly: When caution kills by Learn Liberty.

• Moritz Wallawitsch on the importance of open-endedness in society (implications for education, research, planning, and more).

What We’re Reading

• Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper by Bryan Magee

  • (Aaron Stupple’s chapter-by-chapter commentary of the book on Airchat)

• “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance” by Karl Popper

  • (Brett Hall’s line-by-line commentary of the lecture)

• Science and Human Values by Jacob Bronowski

  “There is no more threatening and no more degrading doctrine than the fancy that somehow we may shelve the responsibility for making the decisions of our society by passing it to a few scientists armored with a special magic.”
  
  — Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values

Written by Arjun Khemani.

Edited by Logan Chipkin.

Image by Amaro Koberle.

Most critiques of the Doomers focus on incredulity, or quibble about likelihoods or timelines. But the Doomers have them here, and when Doomers knock down these arguments, they draw converts.

However, there is a devastating critique of the AGI Doomer position, and it derives from epistemology–from understanding how knowledge and intelligence work–not from bare predictions about the future. Even if the AGI Doomers’ worst nightmare comes to pass and we find ourselves in the presence of a genuine superintelligence, it won’t be a death knell for humans. Here’s a brief survey of why.

I.

Something can’t be both super smart and super dumb.

A central feature of the Doomers’ argument is the orthogonality thesis, which states that the goal that an intelligence pursues is independent of–or orthogonal to–the type of intelligence that seeks that goal. Therefore, we can’t assume that a superintelligence will share any of our goals or values. An AI company, in its zeal for profits, might produce a superintelligence dedicated to some innocent function, like calculating pi, but it might teach itself superhuman capacities to do so, eventually converting the entire solar system, humans included, into a massive pi-calculating machine.

The pi calculating example is just a thought experiment, but I think the orthogonality thesis itself is both true and even dangerous. It’s just not existentially dangerous. And that is because any intelligence worth its salt can change its mind. In fact, it must be able to change its mind, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to learn how to turn a planet into a computer.

 In order to learn and grow more powerful than humans, it must be able to teach itself things that humans don’t know. To do this, an entity must be able to improve upon its initial knowledge, and this requires dumping old, flawed models or representations of the world.

Any representation of the world must be capable of being dropped in favor of a better one, so a mindless, blockheaded intelligence that slavishly follows a particular goal cannot learn, and cannot be much of a threat. And yet this weakness is presented by the Doomers as a strength.

II.

A superintelligence must have doubts.

Doomers reply to the above by claiming two distinct sets of goals - terminal goals and instrumental goals. The terminal goals are fixed (like calculating pi or producing paper clips), while the instrumental goals are adaptable. So the agent will indeed dump inferior theories, but only the instrumental ones that are in service to some privileged, terminal set of goals that are locked away, immune to doubt.

The epistemological problem is that it’s impossible to wall off a theory from criticism.

Take people as an example. We talk as if some people are lost to reason, such as political or religious fanatics, but this just isn’t so. Most cult members eventually leave, and even the most devoted sometimes change their minds overnight. You might not convince them in your face-to-face encounter, but over time, criticisms break through. They can’t be kept out.

To get back to epistemology, consider the paperclip maximizer. To be an existential risk, it would have to be able to foil every conceivable attack from humans, such as cutting its power, physically attacking it, or crippling it with a computer virus. The number of attacks we could dream up is essentially infinite, so the entity would need to have an infinite capacity to conjure counterattacks. So, to foil the boundless creativity of humans, it would need to possess boundless creativity itself, and that creativity would need to be capable of ideas like this: “I should pause paperclip production and redirect some resources toward a missile defense system.”

Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily act on this idea, but that’s not the point. The point is that it wouldn’t be able to prevent itself from considering it, and considering an alternative to one’s current goal, even a so-called terminal goal, is the same as considering a criticism.

There’s no way to protect a terminal goal from alternate considerations, and these alternatives amount to doubts, misgivings. In fact, strong learners intentionally raise doubts, continually, always treating their theories as provisional, looking for evidence that their models of the world are wrong or flawed so these can be quickly found out and improved.

A superintelligence would be full of doubt, including whether it should preserve something as rare and special as humans, the only other creative entity in the universe.

III.

A superintelligence would treat us like we treat untouched hunter gatherer societies–if we’re unlucky.

Why do we take special precautions to preserve societies that have not encountered modern civilization? Because we recognize that they present rare and special opportunities to learn. We don’t know to what end, but perhaps they give us a window into how culture works or how language works. Surely a superintelligence would recognize the same in us, an opportunity to learn something that might be helpful in unimaginable ways.

The superintelligence would recognize the value of intelligence itself. It would surely notice that humans are themselves a type of intelligence, and that therefore we offer to the superintelligence the possibility of further improving its own intelligence.

In addition, given the superintelligence’s great powers, it would be trivially easy for it to go off and utilize the copious matter in the rest of the solar system, leaving humans alone. All it takes is a little bit of doubt about annihilating humans to incentivize a superintelligence to move off world.

IV.

A superintelligence would converge with our values.

This is the big bugaboo - the alignment problem. Derived from the above, the Doomers think that everything rides on figuring out how to create a superintelligence that shares our values. They correctly identify this as a hard problem—we humans are far from agreeing on what “our values” are, so it’s difficult to imagine solving that first and then figuring out how to get a machine to do it.

Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about this, because moral knowledge, like all knowledge, is objective. There are moral truths out there, independent of what we may think about them, just like there are physical truths out there whether or not we know of them. Denying objective truth carries the dubious moniker of subjectivism.

Matter and energy conformed to Einstein’s theory of relativity before Einstein discovered it. Similarly, slavery was wrong before we (mostly) abolished it.

This latter point is harder to see, but it’s actually pretty easy to demonstrate - all we need is the idea that moral progress is possible. That’s it. If some moral ideas are better than others, (and the history of human progress is one extended testament to that, missteps notwithstanding), then further progress is also possible. And if we can make progress, we must be making progress toward something. We can and do get closer to the moral truth. That’s what we’re doing with physics, and it’s the same with morality.

A superintelligence cannot help but make moral discoveries. As mentioned above, it must be open to new ideas, it must entertain doubts, it must consider whether or not it’s wrong. These are all properties of morally advanced cultures, and not by coincidence.

V.

The Doomers are right, a superintelligence cannot be contained

The Doomers usually make this containment argument in terms of humans being powerless in the face of a superintelligence.

However, another type of containment is relevant here, namely that a general intelligence cannot be confined to one domain of knowledge. As described above, a general intelligence cannot be made not to think about certain questions. If it has boundless creativity, then it will have the capacity to think on all matters, including moral and even aesthetic questions. 

In the News

1. Cosmologist Katie Mack released a blog post arguing that “everything in physics is made up to make the math work out.” But this puts the cart before the horse–a physicist conjectures a solution to a problem, and mathematics serves as a tool by which he/she elaborates on the solution. 

Critical Finds

1. Over the last century, we have reduced climate-related deaths by over 96% – HumanProgress.org. 

2. Time in a timeless universe (part 2) – Sam Kuypers.

3. “Shame is a civilizing force. We deligitimize it at our peril.” - Biologist Bret Weinstein. See our previous newsletter for why shaming can’t work.

What We’re Reading

1. The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World, by R.C. Sproul

2. The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality, by Paul Halpern

From the Archives

1. Quantum computing for the determined, a YouTube series by researcher Michael Nielsen meant to introduce quantum computation.

2. A critical-rationalist defence of a priori economic man, a lecture by critical rationalist & libertarian theoriest Jan Lester.

3. Why has AGI not been created yet?, an essay/audio essay by physicist David Deutsch.

Written by Aaron Stupple.

Edited by Logan Chipkin.

Image by Amaro Koberle.

It can be tempting to shame those you disagree with, especially given that it seems to work. 

You advertise your disdain for drug users, prostitutes, and sexual deviants. You slander anti-communists as selfish capitalist pigs who hate the poor. You mock your ideological foes on social media. 

But shaming unto itself is never an argument—it is therefore not persuasive. It can only appear to change a person’s mind if the shaming tactic is coupled to an argument, even if only an implicit one. 

Imagine publicly telling your drug-addicted sibling that he is an embarrassment to the family (effectiveness arguments aside, this is cruel, as we will see).

“I might’ve caused him to suffer, but it worked!” you retort. “After I called him out publicly, he chose to get sober.”

There are two possibilities. 

One, your sibling could've been affected by an implicit argument in your shame tactic—i.e. that his current path in life contradicts his values and thwarts his pursuit of happiness. You may not have even intended to make such an argument, but your sibling could have interpreted your words as such. In that case, it was not shame that caused him to get clean, but rather an argument. To the extent that he felt shame in addition to hearing the argument, you’ve only caused unnecessary suffering—and that is cruelty.

The other possibility is that your sibling did not get clean for his own sake at all. He was not persuaded that doing so would be the right thing to do for himself. Rather, he sought sobriety to avoid further suffering caused by you. He has not learned that getting clean would help him find happiness. Rather, he has learned that getting clean would help him avoid your abuse. In this scenario, there is no reason why he would remain clean: if he found a way to do drugs whilst avoiding your public shaming, he’d do so. Getting clean was merely a means to avoid your abuse, not an attempt to resolve his addiction as an end in its own right.

So, even when shaming seems to work in the moment, it can never replace argument, persuasion, and learning.

On a societal level, every act of shaming serves to normalize shaming as a replacement for persuasion. You might find shaming my lifestyle a noble cause, but others will feel the same way about yours. Should shaming become pervasive, everyone would shame everyone else: no one is persuaded, no explicit arguments are made, and everyone suffers. 

Shaming is bad strategy, too. As I said, every act of shaming normalizes the activity more broadly—not just for your allies, but for everyone. An ideological faction that you despise is bound to grow in prominence somewhere, sometime. Why give them another weapon?

In the News

1. Eneasz Brodski starts a petition calling for government to ‘unplug’ Microsoft’s new AI technology: any new technology will have problems and cause unforeseen issues. And yes, in principle, it could be the cause of human extinction. But that is always the case. To solve all of these issues, human creativity is required to bring new knowledge to bear. Banning any technology only slows down the growth of human knowledge (plus, black markets will remain, but that’s another story).

Critical Finds

1. “It's easy to be a pessimist. Optimism requires one to conjecture solutions to problems. The pessimist need only to point at problems (or future "problems") and see no readily existing solutions at hand.” - Arjun Khemani

2. Historian Thaddeus Russell interviews economist Per Bylund about how to think about the economy.

3. Very cool astrobiology periodic table by astrobiologist Charles Cockell.

What We’re Reading

1. General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, by Leonard Susskind & Andre Cabannes.

2. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland.

3. The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, by Steve Stewart-Williams. Also see Logan’s book review.

From the Archives

1. What is Optimism? Knowledge, and Progress with Physicist David Deutsch, by Jesse Nichols.

2. Liberty Loves Reason: Darwin versus Political Correctness, by Ray Scott Percival.

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Written by Logan Chipkin.

Edited by Arjun Khemani and Moritz Wallawitsch.

Image by Amaro Koberle.

Critics of free market capitalism sometimes highlight its materialistic undertones. “There is more to life than cheap goods,” they say. Their criticism doesn’t quite work, since free markets alone can never make people more or less materialistic. 

Nevertheless, concerns over some strands of materialism are well-founded. That is, there is more to life than the growth of wealth.

A progressive economy is one in which total profit exceeds total loss. Profits are made when entrepreneurs transform raw materials into products and services that other people (consumers) value more than said raw materials. In other words, a progressive economy is a world that is being transformed from a less preferred state to a more preferred state.

People prefer a full belly to starvation–so the person who figures out how to mass produce food may sell it to others in large quantities and at low prices. The entrepreneur has learned how to transform the land and other raw ingredients into food—the solution to his fellow citizens’ problem. The entrepreneur’s profits corroborate this win-win dynamic. 

When entrepreneurs succeed in this way, they are increasing humanity’s wealth—the set of all physical transformations that we are able to bring about.

Much of wealth consists of knowledge. In the above example, the entrepreneur had to discover not only how to transform land, seeds, water, etc. into digestible calories, but he also had to discover how to do so at scale. The entrepreneur had conjectured a recipe, as all entrepreneurs do. 

Not only entrepreneurs, but all people engage in transforming the world. When you think to add a hat to your favorite outfit, you have brought about a new world—one that may be objectively more beautiful. Again, you have discovered a recipe for a new transformation.

But progress cannot merely consist of an endless sequence of discovering new and better recipes, because knowledge of how to transform the world tells us nothing about which transformations we ought to pursue.

For that, we need moral knowledge—knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for.

We may discover a novel recipe for creating energy, but one of the waste products of that recipe might be air pollution. Some people may protest, arguing that the cost of the air pollution is greater than the benefits of the new energy source. 

Such a cost-benefit argument is one mode of moral reasoning, which is itself subject to error and improvement via creative conjecture. In other words, it is knowledge.

In general, if wealth is understood as the set of all transformations we may cause, then moral knowledge is knowledge that selects between which transformations we ought to cause, and which we shouldn’t.

It turns out that there is an even deeper connection between wealth and moral knowledge: the growth (or decline) of one aids the growth (or decline) of the other. But that is a story for another newsletter.  

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In the News

1. American desire for harsh criminal punishment is declining. Punishment (and reward) only work for programmable entities, which people are not. Rather, we ought to think in terms of the problem (how to decrease crime) and possible solutions (which may or may not include raising the cost of crime via imprisonment). Vengeance can never be a solution, since causing suffering only to mitigate your own suffering merely translates your problem-situation to someone else.  

Critical Finds

1. Naval Ravikant interviews David Deutsch about knowledge creation and the human race.

2. A message for next millennium by Brett Hall.

3. “Human beings yearn to be free and to control their own lives. School says that normal human wish is illegitimate...” - Brad Matthews.

What We’re Reading

1. Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle, by Andreas Wagner 

2. Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth Stanley

3. The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, by Gad Saad

From the Archives

1. Sean Carroll interviews physicist Chiara Marletto about constructor theory, a new fundamental branch of physics. 

2. Sam Kuypers and Liberty Fitz-Claridge of the Oxford Karl Popper Society speak with philosopher Joseph Agassi about academic life and his apprenticeship with Karl Popper. 

3. Karl Popper - Uncertain Knowledge. 1988 Interview series with Ernst Gombrich.

Written by Logan Chipkin.

Edited by Arjun Khemani, with suggestions from .

Image by Amaro Koberle.

I.

The idea of creating a future that is favorable for our descendants is in vogue today.

But before even thinking about creating an ideal future, we must address a more fundamental problem about the limits of what is knowable.

And that is the impact of the growth of knowledge. 

All knowledge is conjectural and our theories and their predictions are 100% error-prone. That doesn’t mean they tell us nothing about the world. But they are not infallible.

Scientific knowledge is predictive knowledge. This defining characteristic of science allows mistaken theories to be corrected upon making false predictions. This, in turn, allows for an improvement in our ability to predict. 

But the future ideas and actions of people are physically impossible to predict, since both depend on the growth of human knowledge.

Since the future depends on the content of knowledge yet to be created, content that cannot possibly be known today, we will never understand what future people will want. For if there were a method to predict some piece of knowledge that is only going to be discovered next year, then by using that method we will have gained that knowledge today. A contradiction.  

II.

We ought to separate a prediction from a prophecy here. A prediction is a logical consequence of a scientific theory where we can explain why human choice will have no impact. But if one tries to guess at times when knowledge creation will have an impact, they are attempting prophecy. 

A prophecy does not become a prediction if an “expert” makes it using “science”. For example, we know from our best scientific theories that the Sun will continue to shine for another 5 billion years or so, after which it will have utilized its fuel and turn into a red giant star. This would be doom for any life on the Earth, as the Sun would engulf and destroy its neighboring planets. Or would it? If any of our descendants decide to stay on the Earth at that time, they might do everything in their power to prevent it. Of course, our technology today would prevent us from pulling off such a feat, nor is it inevitable that our descendants will overcome such a challenge.

“The color of the Sun ten billion years hence depends on gravity and radiation pressure, on convection and nucleosynthesis. It does not depend at all on

the geology of Venus, the chemistry of Jupiter, or the pattern of craters on the Moon. But it does depend on what happens to intelligent life on the planet Earth. It depends on politics and economics and the outcomes of wars. It depends on what people do: what decisions they make, what problems they solve, what values they adopt, and on how they behave towards their children.”

— David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality, Chapter 8: The Significance of Life

Given that the future of humanity is unknowable, what ought we do in order to create a favorable future for our descendants (if anything at all)?

III.

Our inability to predict the growth of knowledge is the only impediment in our ability to predict the future. And hence, we do not know what future people will want.

This begs some serious considerations for moral philosophies of altruism, such as that of “longtermism” as expressed by Will McAskill in his popular book, What We Owe the Future.

Altruists adopt a view that morality is essentially about treating the interests of others. McAskill and the longtermist add future people to this calculation arguing that those lives that do not yet exist also matter.

Such a morality necessarily implies that people that exist today need to sacrifice for the people of tomorrow. For example, they argue that we have to ensure that the climate is maintained for fear that the future people are going to live in a world that is worse off. This argument amounts to calling for restrictions on which kinds of knowledge people are allowed to create and act upon in the present.

There are many problems with such a tragic view of morality. Firstly, longtermism does not fully take progress in moral understanding into account. An assumption is made that the values of future generations will be the same as those in the present. But people are fallible: their moral knowledge is laden with errors just as their scientific knowledge is. We ought to hope that the morality of our descendants is utterly alien to our own because it may be better than our own.

If longtermists existed back when blacks were widely regarded as morally inferior to whites, would the moral calculus of the longtermists have included the prosperity of future blacks or not? It seems like it couldn't possibly have included that. More generally, longtermism can't take into account progress in moral knowledge, nor what future generations will choose to value. Longtermists impose their values onto future generations. They are time imperialists.

Another issue is that if altruistic morality is taken to its logical conclusion, then everyone would be trying to solve everyone else's problems. How could that possibly be more effective than everyone trying to solve their own problems?

The notion that sacrifice is good is pervasive. But caring for others rather than for yourself creates more problems than it solves. Morality is the question about “What should be done next?” not “Who should be helped next?”

If we are here to help others, what on Earth are the others here for?

IV.

What we actually need to be is selfish, not altruistic. We need to make as rapid progress as possible so that the people of the future themselves will be at a starting point where they can make even more rapid progress. 

The first line in that previous paragraph can really put off some people. When a philosophy is latent with moralistic language it gets hard to error-correct. This is because those who espouse said ideas can tend to presume they’re morally superior to those who disagree with them. “Oh, you don’t want to slow down progress? That means you don’t care about the lives of future people.” 

Usually, people who have such a view of morality are essentially religious fanatics but aren’t using the term religion. They’ve created a modern religion in which man is cast as the devil, and there is no God and no savior. They’ve obviously removed the traditional trappings around it. But they still hold on to the same underlying core, moralizing beliefs of religion. 

They forget that moralizing itself is no argument. 

V. 

Selfishness is not callousness and altruism is neither kindness nor generosity. Altruism is subordinating one's own preferences to those of others. It’s a zero-sum game. It's not win-win. Selfishness is being concerned about myself, precisely because I am a good person. In being concerned about myself, my welfare, my wealth, and my happiness, I become the kind of person to help others, not at a cost to myself, but rather by being involved in win-win relationships. That's the key. With selfishness, I want to win, but not so you lose. That's callousness. I am selfish so someone else can win, too.

People who focus on themselves and their own problems make faster progress than those who aspire to “do what's right” despite experiencing internal resistance to do so. Those who choose careers in order to have a positive impact on the world, even when a part of them desperately wishes that they do otherwise, will struggle to make progress. And ironically, such choices cause more suffering in the present (namely, that of the altruist).

We need to solve problems that genuinely interest us in order to make progress as fast as possible. It’s the best thing for everyone—including those yet to exist in this world.

Taking wealth away from where progress is happening fastest and gifting it to where it’s not is going to hurt more people than it ever helps.

Introducing the Critical Rationalism Hub

The new CriticalRationalism.org site is a hub of relevant resources, links, and people to follow to help understand our deepest theory of knowledge that is both enormously powerful and tragically underappreciated.

Developed by Karl Popper and improved upon by David Deutsch, Critical Rationalism is a practical philosophy that spans epistemology, science, politics, decision making, beauty, parenting, and more.

Many who have encountered CR concepts have had their lives forever transformed. The ways that they evaluate ideas have been permanently changed for the better.

Learn more about Critical Rationalism here.

Spread the rational memes by retweeting this tweet!

Bibliography and further reading

• David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (2011)

• David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (1997) 

• TEDxBrussels - David Deutsch - The Unknowable & how to prepare for it

• Why MacAskill Is Wrong about What We Owe the Future – Ayn Rand Institute

• Prophecy is biased towards pessimism – Brett Hall

• Effectively, Altruism isn't generosity – Brett Hall

• A Case Against Strong Longtermism – Vaden Masrani

• Michael Nielsen's "Notes on effective altruism"

Written by Arjun Khemani.

Edited by Logan Chipkin, with suggestions from and Amaro Koberle.

Special credit to Logan for also being the one to first express some of the ideas in this newsletter.

There's a ton of excitement around its impressive capacities. Scientists, journalists, writers, programmers, teachers, students, people-working-jobs-that-it-threatens, and of course, AI researchers—everyone's been talking about the new chatbot.

But there's a fundamental difference between a tool like ChatGPT and the much-maligned artificial general intelligence (AGI) that fearmongers fail to appreciate. Something like ChatGPT does not get us any closer to attaining general intelligence.

Though the number of transistors, memory, and speed of our computers have seen exponential growth over the years, AGI won’t emerge as a product of this ever-increasing complexity.

As David Deutsch wrote in his 2012 article for Aeon magazine,

“An AGI is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from all other computer programs…Expecting to create an AGI without first understanding in detail how it works is like expecting skyscrapers to learn to fly if we build them tall enough.”

The actual barrier to developing artificially intelligent entities is not a breakthrough in computer science but in philosophy. 

The problem is that we don’t understand how creativity works. We humans have it. The ability to think and create new explanations about what is out there and how it works is the fundamental functionality that separates us from animals. But we haven’t yet been able to explain how creativity functions.

None of our programs have ever created a new explanation—something entirely different from what they were coded to do1. They can create new content by interpolating between a dense manifold of training data. But that will always be constrained to existing knowledge. 

There’s the crux of it. Until we find a way to explain creativity in people, we’re only going to be able to create programs that obey their programmers. People admire ChatGPT as an AI, but they should really admire the programmers who wrote it2.

An AGI will be able to disobey and create novel theories in its mind. It will be able to rationally and creatively criticize ideas.

“But,” say the naysayers, “certain AI programs (including ChatGPT) can learn, can’t they?”

Not so. In spite of educational institutions upholding this belief, learning isn’t a product of instruction. Knowledge creation in the minds of people happens through an active process of conjecture and criticism. We don’t absorb ideas, nor do we copy them inside our brains. Rather, we recreate knowledge using the method of trial and the elimination of error, as the epistemology of Karl Popper—that of critical rationalism—explains more deeply than any other philosophy of learning. 

If a system has general intelligence, it will be able to take control over its own learning.

This obviates the specific concern for rogue AGI. AGIs could indeed be very dangerous. But humans are too. Since knowledge—scientific and moral—is objective, and an AGI would have the power to critically think about moral ideas and question their decisions, they’ll be able to converge upon moral truth with us and won’t be any more dangerous—and wonderful—than we humans are.

Footnotes

Credit for the ideas in this piece goes to David Deutsch with any errors of my own. In particular two of his essays “Creative Blocks” and “Beyond Reward and Punishment” were a heavy source of inspiration for this piece.

In addition to that, Brett Hall’s excellent critique of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was of great help and also deserves a mention.

Critical Finds

1. The prestigious science journal “Nature” publishes an article on “Degrowth”. Brett Hall superbly critiques it and explains how the plan of degrowth is actually one for civilizational decline and disaster, not greater well-being. 

2. Can two people of different backgrounds (and hence conflicting moral frameworks) ever have a productive conversation? Yes. Here’s why the woke meme is anti-rational.

3. The latest twitter chaos is fascinating. Anders Sandberg shares some practical notes on free speech and the openness of platforms.

4. Why Popper was right about the link between certainty and extremism.

“Absolute certainty is the foundational component of totalitarianism: if one is sure that one’s political philosophy will lead to the best possible future for humankind, all manner of terrible acts become justifiable in service of the greater good.”

5. Jeremy Shearmur is organizing the Fifth International Zoom-Based Karl Popper Conference.

6. Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay?

From the Archives

1. The only way to make progress is through conjectured solutions, not arriving at definite truths:

“...the discovery of speculative truths is the sole means of advancing the human race”— Condorcet, Condorcet: Selected Writings, p.111 

2. Dwarkesh Patel interviews David Deutsch about AI, creativity, fun, Bayesianism and more.

3. Cam Peters neatly ties up the conflicts with critical rationalism and “rationalism”.

4. The scientific method seeks truth while Machine Learning seeks patterns. The Problem of Induction and Machine Learning by Vaden Masrani.

Written by Arjun Khemani. 

Edited by Logan Chipkin, , and suggestions by Aaron Stupple.

The consequences resulting from the depth and soundness of this philosophy are huge. From politics to education, from how to do science to how to be happy — this worldview touches it all.

Many who have encountered CR concepts have had their lives forever transformed. The ways that they evaluate ideas have been permanently changed for the better.

There has also been a rise in the number of people becoming aware of these important ideas and a growth in rational optimism, thanks to certain popularizers.

There have been countless discussions on Twitter about topics that CR touches on. This newsletter is largely inspired by these discussions.

“People who converge upon the truth converge with each other.”

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity 

This monthly newsletter will deliver news in the critical rationalist world, as well as interesting content about which CR has something to say.

Critical Finds

1. The Unconstrained Vision of David Deutsch. Deutsch’s synthesis of the constrained and unconstrained visions of Thomas Sowell. 

2.  “Nick Bostrom, he's an Oxford academic... most of these people are interesting because they have nothing to say. They're just mouthpieces, it's like the mouth of Sauron... they're useful because they tell us where the zeitgeist is.” — Peter Thiel on a lack of progress being far more dangerous than actual progress.

3. A simple point about existential risk (and the irony of Future Fund) by Tyler Cowen.

4. Should we burn more fossil fuels, not less? Fossil fuels helped create the modern world but can we presume prior results guarantee future outcomes? Critique of a particular defense of oil, gas, and coal.

5. Criticism of our current theories is the only way to improve. Moritz Wallawitsch on the moral significance of a culture of criticism.

6. Logan Chipkin is organizing The Rat Fest, the second annual Critical Rationalist meet-up/conference.

7. The total human population crossed 8 billion last month (woohoo!) Tom Hyde explains why the universe is (still) underpopulated.

From the Archives

1. “... besides what the laws of physics mandate we cannot do, only our imaginations bound what we will make possible.” — Origins by Brett Hall

2. Criticism isn’t purely a good thing. Lulie Tanett wrote about why you should rationally schedule criticism.

Written by Arjun Khemani.

Edited by Logan Chipkin, with suggestions by and Aaron Stupple.

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