A Better Explanation

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim · condensed

   The energy waste from chasing the wrong explanation is almost entirely self-inflicted: the better path already existed, thoroughly trodden, and the only reason I missed it was not being aware of it in the first place.

2. 00:54Reference

   Going back in rereading David Deutsches books the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality.

3. 00:54Reference

   Going back in rereading David Deutsches books the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality.

4. 01:57Claim · condensed

   Hearing a complex idea worked through from a number of different angles in real time, against real questions, makes it easier to digest than encountering it once in its clearest written form.

5. 03:28Reference

   I spent the last little bit of time reading just a bunch of different writings by Karl Popper to try and see what David's interpretation of was adding to the epistemology narrative that he credits to Karl Popper.

6. 03:28Idea

   In the last episode I was describing the PSP spiral, the problem solution problem spiral for the growth of information.

7. 04:11Quote

   That's this entire podcast is me just vomiting this stuff out.

8. 04:53Reference

   I'd listened to a number of different podcasts he'd been on before, mainly the series that he had done with Naval.

9. 06:24Claim · condensed

   Statistically the odds are against me contributing any genuinely new explanatory knowledge here, but even if I'm not, I'm still better off stealing from the smartest people rather than the dumbest: stealing from the town moron is a problem, stealing from David Deutsch means my ideas are probably getting closer and closer to solid.

10. 06:24Quote

    If I think that I'm stealing from the town moron, that's a problem. If I think I'm stealing from David Deutsch, I'm probably in a pretty good spot.

11. 07:28Reference

    When David talks about knowledge, he's actually talking about information with causal power, that's his definition of knowledge, and it's physical: knowledge is information which is the physical embodiment of order, a very specific kind of order that can be used or harnessed to affect change.

12. 08:07Claim · condensed

    Explanatory knowledge, which is itself order generation, is created via conjecture, and conjecture precedes empiricism, observation and experimentation, not the other way around: theories originate from bold creative conjectures to explain phenomena, not from induction.

13. 08:45Claim · condensed

    The process runs: a problem exists, a conjecture is proposed, then error correction tests whether that conjecture is a good or bad explanation; a good explanation lets us affect change more efficiently because fewer variables need to be computed, which means less energy has to go into the computing process.

14. 09:22Claim

    A good explanation is one that is hard to vary, a bad explanation is one that's easy to vary.

15. 09:22Quote

    A good explanation is one that is hard to vary, a bad explanation is one that's easy to vary.

16. 09:52Claim · condensed

    A good explanation exhibits maximum compression, nothing can be added or taken away, nothing is swappable, which means it has the lowest number of equivalent microstates, the same quantity entropy measures for any physical system.

17. 09:52Analogy · condensed

    Milk first added to coffee creates a unique pattern the milk and coffee molecules can only combine into in a very limited number of ways, a low-entropy state; once it's fully mixed and turns white, those same molecules can be arranged in way more equivalent positions and still reach the same result, a much higher-entropy, less ordered state.

18. 11:07Analogy · condensed

    David's example of a bad explanation: 'God causes it to rain.' You could swap in Odin, Zeus, or a pink flamingo for God and nothing about the resulting state changes, it would still rain no matter who you subbed in, which means the explanation is incredibly easy to vary and poorly compressed.

19. 11:44Claim · condensed

    A theory with a larger number of swappable or exchangeable parts is a shakier explanation, even when you can still observe results consistent with it.

20. 11:44Open question · condensed

    Creativity itself, the tool that produces explanatory knowledge, has no good explanation yet, not from David and not from me, but that doesn't change the fact that good explanations still give us more order for less.

21. 11:44Claim

    Our world is the only observable area in the known universe where order is increasing.

22. 13:00Analogy

    David's story of an alien monitoring all the planets at once: only our planet has the ability to repel mass rather than attract it, because life has built such an extensive lattice of order that explanatory knowledge can push back against nature.

23. 13:00Claim · condensed

    We are the only entity that can blow an asteroid out of the sky through problem solving; every other planet in the known universe would simply attract that mass rather than repel it.

24. 13:50Claim

    There are three inputs to knowledge creation: information, energy, and creativity.

25. 13:50Claim · condensed

    Information generation isn't a given, it can stop at any time, and it did stop for every one of our closest relatives capable of explanatory knowledge; you can't build a fire without that knowledge, and if it isn't embraced, information generation stops, which is the norm rather than the exception.

26. 14:26Claim · condensed

    Disorder is the standard, and every problem we solve has the potential to create a new problem that kills us, which is the Luddite fear and it's absolutely true, but the alternative, stopping knowledge creation, also ends in extinction.

27. 14:26Reference

    This is the idea that leads to one of his arguments for his principle of optimism, where order is less likely to occur because disorder is the standard.

28. 14:26Analogy · condensed

    David's image of life reaching into a container of black and white marbles: every act of knowledge creation is a reach into a bucket you can't see into, pulling out a white marble means safety, a black marble means destruction, and people wrongly assume each pull brings you closer to the black marble no matter how few there are inside.

29. 15:33Claim · condensed

    The makeup of black and white marbles in the bucket isn't static: each time we pull out a white marble, meaning we gain more knowledge, we're better equipped to stop a future black marble from working, so that black marble effectively turns into a white one.

30. 16:22Claim · condensed

    All suffering comes from a lack of knowledge, a lack of information, a lack of order; with enough knowledge the asteroid poses no threat, but if knowledge creation ceases, as it has for ninety-nine percent of life that has ever existed on this planet, we are eventually doomed.

31. 16:22Quote

    All suffering comes from a lack of knowledge, a lack of information, a lack of order.

32. 16:22Claim · condensed

    The overwhelming vast majority of order-generating entities on Earth have been eliminated because they couldn't generate order fast enough; it's all a process of whether you can do it quickly enough.

33. 16:22Claim · condensed

    If we have enough order we out-compete everything, including every virus, and we can only do that because explanatory knowledge can iterate faster than evolutionary, inexplicit knowledge and lets us foresee problems and react before they happen.

34. 16:22Claim · condensed

    Complexity has increased beyond what any one person can hold in almost every domain, so we generate more knowledge by specializing, and if the system we use for information exchange, money, is less noisy, more signal for less effort, that means less energy spent building trust and more energy redirected toward generating new conjectures.

35. 16:22Idea

    We have leaped over a once necessary energy chasm, this thing that was sucking away all of our energy, now we no longer need to do that, we've leaped over that chasm.

36. 17:52Analogy

    You can't cross a chasm in two small steps, you get there in one giant leap, and that leap is Bitcoin: you have to clear the entire thing.

37. 17:52Quote

    You can't cross a chasm in two small steps... you get there in one giant thing, that's how you cross the chasm, and that cross of the chasm is Bitcoin.

38. 17:52Reference

    The information we are exchanging is where energy is needed most at any given time inside the extended order.

39. 18:33Claim · condensed

    When a problem is difficult and complex, that should be a signal it will require energy to overcome, since the more difficult a problem is, the more energy it takes; the hive mind of humanity allocates energy to where it's most needed based on the supply and demand of its collective individual parts.

40. 18:33Claim

    The conjecture Bitcoin actually postulates is: what if it was harder to change a state machine rather than easier? What benefit would that bestow on life, on the extended order, that wouldn't be possible without such a machine?

41. 19:05Reference

    What benefit would that bestow upon life upon the extended order, you know and really this is the Jason Lowery thesis, right?

42. 19:05Claim · condensed

    The Bitcoin network is hard to vary, in fact the hardest thing to vary, which makes it a good explanation by Deutsch's own standard; the order it generates is the knowledge it explains.

43. 19:37Claim

    Since the dawn of computer science, the dematerialization of physical tools into ones and zeros has produced an abundance of growth in the digital world, because the information realm isn't hamstrung by the laws of the universe to the same extent the physical world is, so friction is removed and copying becomes easy.

44. 20:25Claim

    If instead the digital world were made incredibly hard to change, the physical world would need to adjust in the exact opposite direction: where scarcity in the physical world led to abundance in the digital domain, scarcity in the digital domain would lead to abundance in the physical world, and the system should be thermodynamically sound.

45. 20:25Reference

    He came up with a wild conjecture first then built and solved the Byzantine Generals problem in his head first, so if he solves the Byzantine Generals problem, we have trust sorted.

46. 21:37Claim · condensed

    Once the energy chasm of trust is bridged, nobody else has to build that bridge again; everyone gets to take advantage of it, and a giant state machine that is incredibly difficult to change emerges, which incentivizes physical-world action at a scale never possible before as friction is removed and adoption grows.

47. 21:37Claim · condensed

    If you hold Bitcoin you're holding a fixed portion of all the energy flowing into the system; life without Bitcoin will not be able to compete with life with Bitcoin, because all the energy flows into the system as the more efficient option and no one can shield themselves from its reach.

48. 21:37Quote

    Life sans Bitcoin will not be able to compete with life plus Bitcoin.

49. 21:37Claim

    Good explanations are efficiency boosters for those that employ them: the compression benefits users by letting them redirect energy elsewhere to new problems, which create new solutions, which create new problems, which create opportunities for more solutions, more order, more energy, all the way down and all the way up.

50. 21:37Quote

    It's conjectures all the way down and all the way up.

51. 21:37Quote

    Bitcoin is just an incredibly difficult to vary tool that makes it very useful, and utility equals value.

52. 22:57Prediction · condensed

    This is a thesis where either it's right and it's going up forever, or it's wrong and it's going to zero, and if it's right it doesn't just stop, it doesn't stop at 100k, it doesn't stop, and if it's way bigger I'll still be right, just able to affect change on a much larger scale.

53. 23:35Idea

    Coincidentally is the definition David Deutsch uses for wealth, right, one's ability to affect change, what do you need to transform things, what do you need to affect change, you guessed it, energy.

54. 23:35Quote

    Energy all the way up, all the way down.