# 2023-04-22 - Reason Is Fun - #0 - Effective Altruism, X-risk, e-acc

[Official](https://reasonisfun.podbean.com/e/0-effective-altruism-x-risk-eacc/)
[YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXZmczLNaoY)
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Duration: 01:40:04

## Transcript
### Lulie Tanett

00:00:00 - 00:00:43

Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I'm your host, Lulie Tanett, and today I'm speaking with David Deutsch about effective altruism, X-risk, and effective accelerationism or EAC. And I've called this episode zero because it's a little bit rough and I have something special planned for episode one. And with that, let's get into it. I am curious about what your views on effective altruism are. I have some criticisms of it, epistemological criticisms, you might say.

### David Deutsch

00:00:44 - 00:00:52

There are times when having the wrong theory of how knowledge operates in the world can lead you astray, sometimes arbitrarily far astray.

### Lulie Tanett

00:00:52 - 00:01:03

So what are your main disagreements with EA?

### David Deutsch

00:01:03 - 00:01:33

I guess, framing it in the way I just did, my fundamental disagreement with the EA philosophy is that I think that human problems are basically lack of knowledge of how to solve them, and therefore they are solved by creativity. They're solved by creativity only.

### Lulie Tanett

00:01:33 - 00:01:37

Do effective altruists not think that it's via lack of knowledge?

### David Deutsch

00:01:38 - 00:02:19

They imagine that they have something in addition to creativity that is, or prior to creativity, namely a method that can effectively choose between different proposals for how to deal with something. That's why they're called effective and they're called altruism because altruism is in contrast to, for example, selfishness or callousness, or it is the name of an attitude towards the other person.

### Lulie Tanett

00:02:20 - 00:03:09

The main disagreement I have with effective altruism is that it assumes that we can rank the different possible cause areas or the different possible ways of helping the world. And that if you do that, then you're being effective. And if you don't do that, then you're being ineffective. But the thing that causes the most progress in the world is new knowledge. And so this is an inherently unpredictable thing. Like we don't know which cause area is going to come up with the next breakthrough, because breakthroughs by their nature are impossible to predict. Otherwise, we'd have them already. Up to where you said breakthrough, I was going to say, well, that's what I just said.

### David Deutsch

00:03:09 - 00:05:17

Maybe you said it better, but I don't see them as like being in the position of venture capitalists or startup founders or whatever. That is, I don't see them as trying to cause breakthroughs. I think they see themselves as trying to, first of all, identify problems in the world. And as you said, and I didn't put them in order of priority or seriousness or whatever. And secondly, choose among candidate solutions for which ones of them could make matters worse and which ones of them, as they would probably say, will probably do best at solving them. So it's not a question of the unpredictability of the breakthrough idea. It's a question of the unknowability of the solution idea. What's the difference? Well, you can have an unexpected breakthrough by having an idea which will suddenly make all crops in all the fields in the world twice as productive. I mean, all fields twice as productive. And that could indeed come out of an unknown piece of research in some apparently unconnected field like astronomy that you never know. And most of the big breakthroughs in that sense have not come from working on that breakthrough. I mean, I think the Green Revolution did. But even then, Norman Borlaug didn't initially have in mind the thing which is now called his solution. He just wanted to find ways of making, I'm not an expert, but plants grow better or whatever.

### Lulie Tanett

00:05:18 - 00:05:23

Wait, so you're saying that sometimes working on breakthroughs does in fact cause breakthroughs?

### David Deutsch

00:05:24 - 00:05:55

Occasionally, but more often breakthroughs are caused by working on something else which is being pursued because it's intrinsically interesting. So the inventors of the steam engine and penicillin and that kind of thing were all working on the thing because they found it interesting or because they were interested in a parochial problem that they didn't predict would blow up into a world shaking problem.

### Lulie Tanett

00:05:55 - 00:06:06

How is it possible that you can try to work on a breakthrough and then actually do it given the growth of knowledge is unpredictable?

### David Deutsch

00:06:07 - 00:07:20

Well, it's also, you know, this only happens occasionally and it's unpredictable in the sense that you can't predict that it will solve the problem you intended either. I'm just thinking of the nice case of this, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem a few years ago by Andrew Wiles, and he was interested in Fermat's Last Theorem from childhood and it influenced him going into mathematics. And then, like almost everybody who goes into an area of deep research, he was guided by what he found interesting, what specific problems he found interesting and what specific areas of mathematics that led him into. And it led him into the theory of elliptic curves, which he didn't think was going to be the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem. It turned out to be, but that it turned out to be was a major discovery. And I mean, I'm not a mathematician, but by his account, he started off as a child being interested in Fermat's Last Theorem. As a professional mathematician, he was not working on it. And then it led him to it anyway.

### Lulie Tanett

00:07:20 - 00:07:26

Do you think that the fact it was in the back of his mind contributed to his thing happen to be?

### David Deutsch

00:07:26 - 00:07:34

Yeah, it could have. But I think the way he now remembers it, it was unrelated and came as a surprise.

### Lulie Tanett

00:07:35 - 00:07:46

If you deliberately keep stuff in the back of your mind as, oh, this could possibly solve this other thing. Are you more likely to have research that applies to that?

### David Deutsch

00:07:46 - 00:10:14

I don't know. It might be. I mean, if I go to a case that I know better, namely my own quantum computers. When I wrote my first paper, which contained a description of what we now call a universal quantum computer, I had no idea I was inventing a universal quantum computer. I thought I was dealing with what I thought was an unrelated problem, namely how to counteract the prevailing idea that the many universes interpretation of quantum theory is untestable. And I was sure that it was testable. But the existing prevailing view of quantum theory, namely wave function collapse and that sort of thing, made the issue of testability very obscure. It was all framed in terms of the observer, which was a mystical concept. And is it still a mystical concept? Well, fortunately it's no longer a concept in physics. It's not a mystical concept. Everyone talks about the observer all the time. Yeah. Well, you can say, you know, what does the sun what does the sun look like to an observer on the North Pole sort of thing that there it's not it's there. It's a harmless concept. But in quantum mechanics, in quantum theory, in fundamental quantum theory, it's just not there anymore. At least not if you adopt the Everett interpretation. If you adopt the other interpretations. Well, then it's still there and it's still as bad as before, except now one doesn't have the excuse that nothing is known about what is different about an observer from anything else in the Everett interpretation or in Everettian quantum theory, as we should now call it. Observers and giraffes and electrons are all treated uniformly by the same theory. And you never have to use a different theory if you identify something as a giraffe or as an observer. So it's the same theory all the way through. So when people make breakthroughs intentionally instead of accidentally or by working on something else, is that or how random is that?

### Lulie Tanett

00:10:14 - 00:10:19

Is it just completely random or are there things that you can do to make that more likely to happen?

### David Deutsch

00:10:22 - 00:10:27

I don't know. This is really a question about psychology, because it's saying like, what would ...

### Lulie Tanett

00:10:27 - 00:10:28

You do instead?

### David Deutsch

00:10:28 - 00:10:41

Well, instead you would work on what's interesting. And but if you're interested in how to feed the world rather than in you could be interested in ...

### Lulie Tanett

00:10:41 - 00:11:33

How to feed the world, you could be interested in plants and how to help them grow. And that second thing may be more likely to give you the answer to the first thing, even if it's not in your mind. If in your mind you want to feed the world, you may be biasing yourself towards the prevailing view of what kind of thing is needed to feed the world, namely larger grain ships or something. You don't have to be biased in that way. You could be a Silicon Valley type entrepreneur who's like, OK, I'm going to figure out how to feed the world and I'm going to look at all of the underutilized like, oh, maybe we can survive on plankton or whatever it is.

### David Deutsch

00:11:34 - 00:11:42

Well, you see that that's an example of a theory that's in the prevailing consensus, you know, the plankton and the... I just made that up. I didn't even know that was a thing.

### Lulie Tanett

00:11:43 - 00:11:44

Is that a thing?

### David Deutsch

00:11:44 - 00:14:18

Yeah, I think that's a thing. And generally making use of food in the ocean and ocean farming and the thing is, when I say biased, that's maybe can be interpreted as a pejorative term. I didn't mean it as pejorative. I mean, we always start from existing knowledge, our own existing knowledge and then existing knowledge that we find in the world by looking at what other people have done. And it's impossible not to begin with existing knowledge. You can't begin by looking at all possible theories, because that is simply too large a set to fit into a brain. But then what makes the difference between working on something directly versus working on other stuff that then happens to have the breakthrough as a result? Well, one thing is that if you use the criterion of what is the most fun, then what you're interested in solving is intimately related to what you find fun. And also, as Peter Medawar said, science is the art of the soluble. So your growing theories about what might be soluble also play a role in what you find fun. So, for example, when you're playing tennis, basically what you want to do is win the point, but winning the point might be several hits away from in a long rally and so on. So at any moment, you've got to decide whether to attempt a winner now or attempt a shot which gets you closer to being able to do a winner later, or just to play a winning shot that isn't a winner, but which nevertheless wins the point, or to play a shot which makes your opponent make mistakes about what you are trying to do so that even if you lose that point, you'll win the next one. So for the non tennis people in the audience, i.e. me, what's the difference between a winner and something that isn't a winner but wins a point? So a winner is what they call in their terminology, a shot that is unreturnable, because, for example, it's going too fast or it's too near the edge or that kind of thing.

### Lulie Tanett

00:14:18 - 00:14:51

The trouble with winners is that they are also more risky than normal shots. So in trying to put it too fast or too near the edge, you may go out and thus lose the point. So you could make a more normal shot that is more returnable and still they fail to return it? Or they return it in such a way as to make the next shot easier to hit for you and so on. As I said, there's also the psychological side and so now I've forgotten what this is the answer to.

### David Deutsch

00:14:52 - 00:16:13

Oh yes, Peter Medawar, science is the art of the soluble. So what you judge to be soluble by way of a sub problem affects what you find fun, because you'll only find the idea of hitting a winner. How should I best hit a winner? You only find that fun if you think that you could hit a winner, that it will be, it won't be too hard and too risky to attempt that. So instead you try a lesser shot. Well, if you're trying to feed the world and that is your overriding consideration, and if that is different from the thing you were doing that you think is the most fun, the most soluble, the most interesting sub problem, then if you force yourself to try to answer this overriding problem, you'll be depriving yourself of one of the main driving forces of creativity, which is being interested in it, being fun. But you're interested in the overarching thing. Well, there are different ways of being interested. You may find the problem fascinating or you may find the fact that people are starving unpleasant.

### Lulie Tanett

00:16:14 - 00:16:37

It's about being interested in the result versus the actual problems. It's sort of like destination versus journey. Yes, yes. So it's how you choose your sub problems. Do you choose them according to fun, solubility, that kind of thing, or do you choose them entirely according to how you think they will fit into the final answer?

### David Deutsch

00:16:37 - 00:16:48

Another thing that often happens is that people are interested in some final answer, some final problem, but they end up solving a different one.

### Lulie Tanett

00:16:50 - 00:18:01

Because they are actually working on specific problems, even if they've got this sort of lofty goal. Yes. Hmm. From the idea that all evils are due to lack of knowledge, it immediately, I think, leads you in a different direction from effective altruism, namely trying to rank the problems and trying to rank the proposed solutions, which is knowledge always begins with existing knowledge. So the thing you would naturally do if you had a knowledge-based view of human problems is you would look at existing problems and see which of them are interesting and fun, and once you have found one that is, try to modify some theory which is participating in the problem. So for example, you think that people dying of malaria is a problem, and it certainly is, and so what knowledge exists?

### David Deutsch

00:18:01 - 00:21:30

Now if knowledge of how effective, say, mosquito nets are is lacking, and that if you decide that the people who are at risk of malaria don't understand the benefits of mosquito nets, then you would think of ways of telling them this. Isn't that what they do? Well, I think that what they do is they try to provide them with mosquito nets, as opposed to telling them that they have a misconception about the effectiveness of mosquito nets. Right, but they're also poor, so maybe they could just do with the mosquito nets. Well, if they're poor, they think that their main problem is lack of money, and you think it's lack of mosquito nets, and again, I don't think that the path to, you see, giving them the mosquito nets anyway when what they want is the money violates the canons of rationality. It's not allowing their conception of what is wrong to inform what you do in order to try and solve their problem. So the kind of thing that happens is that you give them mosquito nets, and they sell them to the local warlord to use as camouflage netting or whatever. If they don't see the problem the way you see it, they're not going to see the solution. They probably won't see the solution that you think you have as a solution. So presumably one of you is right, or maybe one of you is right, or one of you is more right than the other one. One of you is wrong, that's for sure. At least one of you is wrong. Yes. So you might have already thought of the reasons that they have for that theory. They think it's worthwhile because they don't realize that illness is actually more costly than health, and you've also thought about what they might do given their current knowledge and their incentives like selling things to warlords. You can account for that, and then with your knowledge, then you can do the right thing instead of doing the thing that is, I don't know, the most consensus-based. Yes, so I guess this is the justification that EA advocates would have, but the thing about that story, notice that the thing about that story is it doesn't include any creativity in the minds of the victims. I mean the beneficiaries. If your story, your justificatory story for what you're doing by way of altruism doesn't include the confrontation between the people, the theories of the people you're trying to help and your theories, then even if you're right, I object to that whole thing in principle because it's not treating people as people. But in Will MacAskill's first book, Doing Good Better, the intro chapter is about how there were people who were doing charities and they created this thing that you had to push this, ...

### Lulie Tanett

00:21:30 - 00:21:55

What do you call it, merry-go-round. Oh yeah, and generate electricity. Yeah, and those people were not properly accounting for what that was actually like, and so basically either people weren't using it or they were doing it in a kind of very work-like way. So already in EA 101, it accounts for that. It's saying like, okay, how about we actually look? Is this in fact effective?

### David Deutsch

00:21:55 - 00:24:29

Yes. So it does accord with my prejudices in these matters that existing charities, existing ways of addressing the problems of suffering people elsewhere that one knows nothing about, that existing charities can systematically get this wrong and not only fail to address the relevant problems but actually make matters worse by their intervention. Because having them sell their stuff to warlords may be worse than nothing because it will involve them with the warlords and that kind of thing. So as a critique of existing methods, I have no objection to the EA position at all. What we are discussing here though is whether the EA worldview is a way of doing better than existing charities or than the best existing charities or whatever, like in a particular area, the idea is to do as well or better than existing non-EA type charities who are motivated by different philosophies. Some of them are motivated by socialist ideas of development and some of them are motivated by Christian ideas of self-sacrifice and so on. Some of them are motivated by having fallen in love with the problem of how to fix this. You are asking me to evaluate EA's philosophy compared with those other philosophies and I think it's better than some. But it's fundamentally misconceived because it has a wrong view of what knowledge is and therefore of what problems are, what problems in general consist of. And this whole picture, which can easily lead to ignoring the wishes and creativity of the people when it's trying to help, is wrong and can be bad, just as much as the socialist or the Christian or whatever way of looking at the human condition can be.

### Lulie Tanett

00:24:30 - 00:25:21

What about the idea of giving away as much of your money as possible so that you can do the most good in the world? That has to me, I mean I think sometimes that can be the right thing to do, but in general that smacks to me of underestimating one's own creativity on principle. That is, on principle one is saying the things that I find interesting and would find it fun to do with my life. The mere fact that I'm doing something with my life rather than with someone else's life is a taint.

### David Deutsch

00:25:21 - 00:26:06

It's a reason why I'm not being good, I'm not being altruistic, I'm not being effective. Instead I'm being selfish, I'm being inefficient and that may or may not be true. And there is no magic way of deciding whether a given pound is best spent on oneself or on a person's life. On a person one knows or on a person one doesn't know or importantly on one's own children because they are also creative people to whom one has a responsibility unlike most of those other cases.

### Lulie Tanett

00:26:06 - 00:26:18

If you're just a single person and you know that you can get by just fine with however much money per year, why not donate the rest of it?

### David Deutsch

00:26:18 - 00:27:56

Yes, well again you can't prophesy the path of your own life. So if you say invest your money, you are already allowing it to be used for purposes that other people think are best because you haven't got an immediate use for it and you are giving it to them on condition that later you will get it back with interest. That's a bit more future-proof. I think it's more general because the market has got millions of possible applications of your money. And if you... So supposing an unexpected thing comes up like you become... you get some terrible disease and you require 24-hour nursing care for the rest of your life which is going to be decades, then you will rely on either the state or charity and so in that case your so-called altruism is simply equivalent to throwing away your wealth. But meanwhile you've helped other people. Well we've... It's not throwing away. We have discussed that in the first half of this question. In both cases the issue is how do we deal with problems that we don't yet know or problems that are known to other people or...

### Lulie Tanett

00:27:56 - 00:28:02

Well why can't you just invest in problems that you've looked into, like cause areas that you've looked into?

### David Deutsch

00:28:02 - 00:28:25

Well because the ones that you haven't looked into may be the ones that are a drain on society eventually which includes being a drain on other people. Yeah but you don't have to be perfect. You can just look at what you know something about and be like okay I'm going to tithe and donate my money to this particular cause, like knowing that it will help this particular thing.

### Lulie Tanett

00:28:26 - 00:28:36

Tithing is a mechanical operation. That is, what percentage are you going to tithe? 10%?

### David Deutsch

00:28:36 - 00:28:42

Well why 10%? Because that's traditional. Why? What tradition? Well it's the tradition of my religion.

### Lulie Tanett

00:28:43 - 00:28:45

When was your religion founded?

### David Deutsch

00:28:45 - 00:28:51

Oh 950 years ago. What on earth did those people know about what ...

### Lulie Tanett

00:28:51 - 00:30:13

Proportion of your income is optimal to give to other people? They were living in a different time with different problems. They didn't have state aid. They... On the other hand they didn't have diseases that could be cured by hospitals. But again you don't need to be perfect. You can just pick anything that kind of works for your lifestyle that you know will help. And money helps people right? Like giving your money to some kind of problem. So here in Oxford there are posters up at bus stops and various other places saying do not give money to beggars. So at least they think that giving money, a random person giving money to this class of person, beggars, does not help the beggar. It actually makes the beggar's lot worse because they think the beggar is only going to buy drugs or this is going to fund a criminal gang or... And so on. Can you not with a bit of research figure out whether it's like the beggar case or like the helpful case? If Oxford City Council can't do that research, I'm not sure I can. They have far more resources to do it with. Sorry why can't they do that research?

### David Deutsch

00:30:13 - 00:34:09

Well presumably they have done it before they put the poster up. And so you wouldn't... And so they have discovered that giving money to beggars isn't good for some reason. And... But therefore it's not true that giving money to people in general solves their problems. Yeah but I'm saying well don't give money to people in general but like as a default it is usually helpful except in these special circumstances. Unfortunately, I think it is true in general that if you are giving money blindly to other people then it would usually do good except in special circumstances like where they are already a criminal or a beggar or are in a country with warlords and that sort of thing. The trouble is that's not the situation that one is facing when one is deciding whether to tithe one's income. The situation that one is trying to remedy is precisely a situation where problem solving has already gone wrong for some reason. Like the very existence of the criminal gang or the drug addiction or the drug addiction subculture or the warlord. Those are all things where the problem solving mechanism that we in the civilised world or in the privileged parts of the civilised world take for granted have gone wrong. And I think in those specific cases, pouring money into it will typically make it worse. I'm not sure by... I'm not at all sure by the way that the Oxford City Council are right about this but I'm just saying that the fact that they've come to this conclusion is evidence that it's at least evidence that this is complex and requires knowledge and that the whole problem is creating that knowledge not distributing your money. Distributing your money may come at the end of your decision as to how to improve knowledge. I don't even think that... never mind beggars, if we go outside into the street now and stop the first person we see and give them a hundred pounds that that is likely to help with their problem. I mean if they don't have a problem I guess you know if they don't have a you know if they don't have a money related problem then I guess it will help. But that's precisely the situation where you don't want to give people money. So if they are suffering, they might be suffering because their spouse has left them or because their child has died or because they are an illegal immigrant and the police are about to eject them from the country. You know people have all sorts of problems and in many cases money wouldn't help and in many cases money will make matters worse and if you just compare that with using your money to facilitate something which you find absorbing and fun and fruitful then you're in the best position to judge that and I think then spending money on that is the best thing you can do. It might be that that succeeds beyond your wildest dreams and you become Bill Gates and then you have a very severe problem that you don't have enough fun-generating problems of your own. That is you already have enough money to pursue all those to your heart's content and you still have a lot of money left over.

### Lulie Tanett

00:34:09 - 00:34:22

That changes the problem.

### David Deutsch

00:34:22 - 00:35:30

Then it's a good idea to give some of your money away. I don't think tithing is the thing. Your religion's founder can't possibly know if you're Bill Gates that you should give away 10% or 90% or 99% or whatever. That's a matter of your problem situation and once you realize that that is your problem you know how to create that knowledge you've then got to actually create it. It's not trivial. There's no expert you can ask such as EA. What should I how much of my money should I give away and to what? Another thing that EA is interested in is existential risk. So there are all sorts of possible risks that would not just damage some parts of society but would wipe out human existence like bio, AI, destroying everything, nuclear, you know a ton of stuff.

### Lulie Tanett

00:35:30 - 00:35:50

What do you think of X-risk and I guess my question is something like should we be working on that and given all of the stuff that you were just saying about how innovation is unpredictable how do we deal with this fact that solutions are unpredictable and we might all be destroyed?

### David Deutsch

00:35:50 - 00:37:14

Yes so one of the errors that thinking in terms of game theory basically leads you into is underrating risks that are not existential risks because if you take literally I mean I think no one does take it literally but their ideology says that they ought to take literally that the destruction of the human race the human species is infinitely bad and therefore even a 10% probability that this will happen has a disutility of 10% of infinity which is still infinity. The disutility of it even if it has one in a thousand probability is one thousandth of infinity which is still infinity therefore existential risks trump all finite risks. I think people like Eliezer Yudkowsky take it seriously. It might also be just the thing he finds most fun in which case fine. That's actually another thing I wanted to mention about the previous topic which was that so one of effective altruism's things is that you should find causes that are underserved where there's low hanging fruit.

### Lulie Tanett

00:37:14 - 00:37:36

And so you can have like an outsized effect on it and you would say oh well you should instead of doing that you should follow what is fun and interesting but doesn't low hanging fruit make something more fun like doesn't saving the world from catastrophic extinction doesn't that like make it a bit more exciting?

### David Deutsch

00:37:36 - 01:00:43

It does but I think it is simply a misallocation of resources again it means that if you're if someone is worried about say the next pandemic and is saying well then you know the black death killed one in three people in the world and the advent of European diseases to North America killed 90 percent of the existing population and so on someone who has this existential risk view will say well 90 percent is completely different from 100 percent you can recover from losing 90 percent of the people and or you know 70 percent or whatever 30 percent I mean in the black death and look we've recovered and the Native North Americans have recovered that's nowhere near as bad as losing everybody losing the whole human race and this means that they this way of thinking I think is wrong because I think in real life given the way that knowledge is and the way that ignorance exists and the way that the future is unpredictable because of the growth of knowledge and because of other things the amount of creativity that it is worth diverting towards giant disasters which aren't existential is indistinguishable from what it is worth expending on genuine existential problems I mean that is if these uncertainties and the knowledge things are applicable if there was a giant asteroid heading towards the earth where we can actually use physics to predict what it will do and what would prevent it then it certainly is worth diverting all the creativity on earth to deflecting it but those are rare cases and also by the way note those are cases where there won't be much argument there won't be a faction that resists trying to stop the asteroid couldn't you have a good explanation about why a particular disaster is on the horizon like with the AI risk you can have good explanations of things which aren't necessarily predictive or aren't very predictive the only way you can have very predictive good explanations which are very predictive is when they do not involve when the process in question doesn't depend on creativity or on which you have a good explanation that it won't depend on creativity I mean you know you can never rule out that the asteroid is actually inhabited by aliens who will divert it without us doing anything could happen but we have good explanations for why that won't be so that doesn't mean that they are perfectly reliable but that's what we have to go on our best explanation but things like things that are called existential risks by people who want to divert more creativity into combating them are not like that they are not things where the risk is the last line of a proof from our physical theories it's the last line of an argument that makes certain assumptions about humans or, in the case of AGI, about people, the AGIs being people but there even then it's humans and people that one is making arguments about and such arguments aren't very reliable even if one uses the true epistemology there is no way of getting past the fact that we can't predict future knowledge but if you use the wrong epistemology you will reliably err on the side of pessimism and as I explained in the beginning of infinity prophecies of the growth of knowledge in effect the prophecies about unknown future knowledge are inherently biased towards bad outcomes because the good outcomes will typically or overwhelmingly be caused by the solution of what problem one is imagining so this is the classic thing that was wrong with Malthus's prediction that there would be mass starvation or else draconian intervention in people's lives because the growth of population would happen that he predicted correctly and that food production wouldn't keep up with it which he failed to predict correctly and the reason that was that he was mistaken about the first thing sorry he was mistaken about the second thing but not about the first is not an accident in order to predict that the population would go up he would have to predict that he would only have to predict that people's ideas about marrying having sex having children would not change much over a time scale of decades whereas to predict the other thing he would have to predict that knowledge of agriculture irrigation selective breeding and that kind of thing would not go up either and he probably hadn't even heard of the sciences which would eventually produce those things let alone have a theory about how they were going to go in the next few decades nobody could have and exactly the same mistake has been made by resource pessimists ever since again and again the same mistake so Paul Ehrlich whom I heard lecturing when I was a school student we went to see his lecture and he said that none of us had any future the world was going to be starving within billions would be starving in 15 20 years and he was making the same mistake as Malthus he explicitly was extrapolating things like what knowledge of how to make crops better existed at the time of his prophecy into the future whereas in fact people were working on this Borlaug was working on that very thing and they should have brought him in as a lecturer instead of Paul Ehrlich except maybe he was too busy doing his thing that but by the way that's also true that the people who are most creative in a field are inhibited from doing what is necessary to evangelize the what they see as the important things in that field so there's a bias again towards people who don't understand it who don't understand that field I think the world needs to learn the lesson about unknown knowledge that when you are making the assumption that unknown knowledge will lack a certain thing or will have a certain thing you are purporting to do what is impossible you are in fact creating an imaginary story that has a bias towards pessimism and you are systematically depriving young people of what they need to solve those problems so given we might be destroyed by existential risk what can we do like is there anything that we can do to cause that to not happen yes the most general thing we can do is to value creativity and the growth of knowledge in general provided it's directed towards what people think are interesting problems or what is fun and so on that has the best chance of coping with problems that we don't know about yet by the way that's another problem with the whole concept of existential risk which is that I think that if the human race is going to be wiped out by an existential risk I would guess that it's one we don't know about and ea type decision making is only diverting us from that because the way that that is going to be discovered is by people who are working on something else so that's one thing another thing that is worth pointing out in this regard is that all problems are parochial it's only solutions that are universal and general so when you're thinking about how to prevent people dying of malaria for example or prevent people from starving for example you really need to address problems that are unique to malaria or unique to starvation or agriculture and so on and the solutions will typically come from those problems even though not necessarily the ones that you think are going to be the solution the ones that you think are going to be the solution may well not be but your interest will take you in the direction of the soluble so you're saying that it's just total chance whether we survive existential risk or not worse the probability of our survival is unknowable it might be zero or it might be one or anything in between aren't you saying doesn't that mean that there's nothing you can do no there's I've just been saying things you can do the things which will solve problems but you cannot know whether you're solving a given problem will solve the one that will kill us if there is one this feels really abstract to me so what is what is the basic thing that you can do like as a as a person like I'm thinking oh no all of the risks are impending what do I then do it's slightly hard to answer that question because to give an example I'd have to give an example of an existential risk so suppose that from god's perspective the human race is going to die next year of a super volcano erupting in yellowstone national park and it will destroy the united states and produce a cloud that will destroy agriculture for enough years for everyone to starve and the remaining people will be killing each other and so on and in the end there won't be any humans left so I just invented that it's one of an infinity of things I could invent and I'm a bit sorry to have invented that because maybe some people in the audience will now go off and worry about that but my point is that if that's going to kill us no matter what we do then we shouldn't be thinking about what to do if it's going to kill us but only if we don't discover the answer then the best way of discovering the answer to that problem is to solve other problems so for example it might be that and again this is I'm just making this up so I'm not saying that this scenario is plausible but it might be that the main reason that people that the population of north america will be killed by the super volcano is that they don't escape in time so if we find a way of them escaping in time that might be that might it might happen by it might be done by people who don't even know there is a super volcano underneath them so why isn't the answer uh or is the answer maximize the growth of knowledge well that that's too vague as a as a policy because suppose I want to maximize the growth of knowledge that still doesn't tell me what to do it doesn't tell me some things not to do like create laws to block innovation yes although not even that because if you yes if you create laws to block all innovation then that would certainly be harmful but I think nowadays nobody actually advocates a static society when they advocate banning things they advocate banning specific things even people who want us to go back to nature and live in the forest and that sort of thing are not usually imagining that we are then not going to work on ways of curing diseases yeah but then would you say that's fine no it's not fine but the criticism of it is not that it would produce stasis well it would produce stasis in particular areas yeah but there's no argument that stasis in particular areas has existential risk well okay for example if you block all atomic bomb technologies you block all of our ai technologies and you allow other governments to develop them that is a block to innovation that would that could be an existential risk it may not be yes so that is an existential risk so that's a counter to what you just it is but again most people at least see themselves as advocating a minor restriction which actually helps the growth of knowledge in other respects and you mentioned nuclear weapons you know there's the issue of should the knowledge of nuclear weapons be kept secret for a start well I think most people would say it should be kept secret because if nothing else because of the issue of bad actors getting hold of it and using it to harm the world and if I were to say or if someone were to not me were to say yes make it public but also do research into how to counteract nuclear weapons well that's a risk in itself and maybe we would find a way of counteracting nuclear weapons or maybe we wouldn't and it's easier just to keep them secret but if our whole policy about nuclear knowledge is to keep it secret and forbid all further work on it then we will go down because eventually you won't be able to keep it secret and you won't be able to prevent the wrong people working on it and people improving it and meanwhile you won't be improving it so by the way the knowledge to counteract nuclear weapons might consist of something that's not even nuclear it might consist of better means of persuasion or better ways of winning a war even if the enemy has nuclear weapons another thing I wanted to ask you about is that there has been a response to effective altruism and this ai doomerism online and one of the pockets of responses is called effective accelerationism and it was sort of started as a like partly joking like because it's effective altruism effective accelerationism but also quite serious about what it thinks and the basic idea is that instead of hampering progress by shutting down data centers and moratoriums and so on we should be seeking to accelerate progress and these technologies as fast as possible and that yes that carries risk but it is still the right thing to do you it's a bit ambiguous but I largely agree with that as fast as possible is what's ambiguous there like if we were fighting a war for survival and somebody said we should make this weapon as fast as possible then I think that would be reasonable but I think when we're not fighting such a war saying that we should just advance everything as fast as possible first of all doesn't tell you what to do and also it suggests doing things that aren't maximally fun it's possible that I'm mischaracterizing it because I only just discovered it like three days ago but I'd be curious to hear more specifically so one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about this is that it is based in some physics and whenever I hear a philosophy that claims to be based in physics or claims to be based in logic I immediately get a bit suspicious because lots of people use fundamental theories in order to justify something that actually doesn't need that justification and it was just used to make it sound stronger and so I couldn't really tell initially not being a physicist myself whether is is the theory that it presents cranky or not and so that's kind of the first thing that I want to explore and then after that we can go into the tenets of effective accelerationism and we can see what you think about that so the basic idea is that it is based on modern thermodynamics and there is a particular theory that life exists because of the law of increasing entropy and that that drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties an example of this is a flower that uses the energy of the sunlight and then ejects infrared light which is sort of less concentrated energy and so overall entropy increases but the flower maintains its structure that's true so far although I think life exists because of the law of increase of entropy is slightly perverse way of putting it I'll go into that in a second so this is based on the work of someone called Jeremy England ah yes I've heard of that uh-huh so I mean I'll just maybe I'll just like read excerpts from this article that I found on it basically so there's like inert matter and then there's life and life is better at capturing this energy and then dissipating it as heat and so like the flower it catches some sunlight energy and then it dissipates it as this infrared light and in general life is is better at this thing so to quote this article when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy like the sun or chemical fuel and surrounded by a heat bath like the ocean or atmosphere it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy this could mean that under certain conditions matter inexorably acquires the key physical attributes associated with life yeah well under certain conditions is doing a lot of work there you know a flower or a plant is green which means it's not white so if the ground was white or you know sand colored or something then it would reflect the sun's ordered energy and it wouldn't dissipate much on the other hand and the green would be converting some of that ordered energy into disordered energy and would therefore capture more of it than the ground would on the other hand if the ground is black then the black is maximally efficient at capturing ordered energy and converting it to disordered energy so compared with the black surface a plant isn't very good and it's not very good but I think the thing you read out is saying something additional to that it's saying that that if the species has got a given ability to do this then evolution will tend to make it do it better until eventually it presumably it's as efficient as a black body and will dissipate energy as well as a black body although I would have to add that it can do better than that because it can go and look for ordered energy where the even the black body won't get up off its hind legs and look for sources of ordered energy whereas a living thing can ...

### Lulie Tanett

01:00:44 - 01:31:56

Have you heard of this Jeremy England person uh his work before yes I and my collaborator Chiara Marletto were told of this I think basically as soon as his paper came out and we looked over it and I'm afraid we didn't get much out of it because well possibly through our own fault we found it very mathematical on the mathematics side on the theory side it was very mathematical on the physics side it seemed to us very vague I suppose the main thing is it we didn't see how it would fit into anything else that we were interested in like constructor theory and constructor-theoretic thermodynamics so that doesn't speak to whether it's true or not that seems really surprising that it wouldn't be relevant to that because the idea is all about things like how life came to be and it explains what might have happened in the primordial soup and um and the structure of things like snowflakes and sand dunes and stuff where you're surprised that there's that kind of structure I think the actual problems about how life originated are it seems to me not amenable to this kind of extremely general description because you might end up with a description that says yes life began because things tend to evolve towards things that dissipate energy better but that's not going to tell you the answer if the real answer is in the form such and such a chemical was able to form a replicator and it could form a replicator better if it did this dissipation better so continuing although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or closed system an open system can keep its entropy low that is divide energy unevenly among its atoms by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings so that's true so far not exactly so in a closed system the entropy of a subsystem will tend to increase but the entropy of the whole closed system will stay constant so it's just that you know entropy in an ordered system tends to become disordered but the information has to get out before before you can order system me and something like sunlight where that energy is only of one kind going in one direction and so on and dissipated energy goes in all directions and it consists of all wavelengths and the point about disordered energy is that it can't be harnessed to do anything to create structure like life so the way I understand this is that there are some systems where entropy increases for some reason which are closed systems which is even more surprising to me because I kind of would have thought that an open system would have more entropy but what do I know and then you've got these open systems I don't know what open means but what does open mean interacting with the environment ah okay so okay so over time if you let something just sort of sit there then it's just going to deteriorate whereas if you can grab energy or grab something from the environment ordered energy what does ordered energy mean ordered energy is something like sunlight which is going in one direction it's doing one thing it's supposed to bouncing around in random directions yes cool if you if you put a plant in a sealed container it will die if it can't interact with the outside then it will die for two reasons one is that it will make entropy and the entropy will grow will build up inside its container and it can't lose the entropy to the outside world and so it will get basically poisoned and on the other hand if it if the container is sealed it won't be able to import new ordered energy like sunlight from the outside so for both those reasons an object in a sealed container will eventually die cool so then Jarzynski and crooks showed that entropy produced by a thermodynamic process such as the cooling of a cup of coffee corresponds to a simple ratio the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process that is spontaneously interacting in such way that the coffee warms up well I can believe that but you know I'd need a piece of paper to work it out England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility we can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment's external drives on the way to getting there okay now I'm beginning to be suspicious because first of all there's an infinite infinity of ways in which one can judge that something is more likely so in some sense an outcome may be more likely than another outcome but for example if you place a teacup on the on the table there is a sense in which the most likely outcome is that and the solid um I would take that a bit yeah uh so that's why that notion of more likely is not appropriate but isn't that just not true though like what do you mean there's a sense in which that's more likely so Feynman said that thermodynamics is the science of what happens when the fast things have already happened but the slow things haven't yet happened so in the very long run it is far more likely that the cup of tea will liquefy and spread all over the table that is if you if you're talking about 10 to the power of 10 to the hundred years then it will almost certainly do that whereas over a shorter time it's most likely that the solid part of the cup will stay where it is but the liquid part of the of the cup and contents will get colder and the surroundings will get warmer but that's what happens when the fast things have already happened and the slow things haven't happened yet so that already tells you that when you're trying to calculate what is likely you've got to take real world things like what's a likely time scale for the process you're trying to measure and the reason that that I'm suspicious that you know I don't know I you know I couldn't understand the math in this paper basically but the kind of thing you can easily get wrong is that the real life probabilities are always about this medium term thing they're never about the long term the long term is the long term is much easier to calculate but it may not be realistic so for example we know that although life forming from inorganic precursors to something like a bacterium took an amazingly short time when I say short I mean like 300 million years or something so you know that's a long time by many people's standards although that bit of evolution happened relatively fast there then followed a much longer period of billions of years during which there was nothing on earth but bacteria or you know we perhaps wouldn't call them bacteria today but bacteria like organisms which were never more efficient than before at converting ordered energy into disordered energy then there was a moment there was a moment when photosynthesis was discovered by evolution and then it went a bit faster but then photosynthesis producing oxygen was discovered and then there was a thing called the great oxygenation event which completely changed the biosphere and also the whole crust of the earth down to many kilometers and everything was changed so you need something more to explain this you need something more than just saying there is a tendency you know there was always a tendency right from the from when the earth was formed there was always a tendency to produce blue green algae which were the ones that invented oxygen producing photosynthesis which was much more efficient than previous photosynthesis which was itself much more efficient than previous processes so that there was a tendency didn't tell you that there wouldn't be several billion years before it happened and it doesn't also doesn't tell you that it would never happen it doesn't tell you that it wouldn't never happen so are you saying that that this would need a particular explanatory theory to say why it holds or are you saying that there is a reason to think that it doesn't hold mostly the first thing but I just wanted to give an example of how it how something could have a strong tendency to happen and yet not happen and something like that happened for billions of years in the actual history of life on earth but we don't know that that's what the theory says it's not just about like yeah well I can't I can't actually comment on a theory I don't know yeah but when the premise is that something has a tendency to happen that's not in itself an explanation of why it happened yeah to zoom out a bunch the reason I'm asking this in the first place is that this half meme movement philosophy response to effective altruism was like hey this theory seems good what if reality actually works this way what would that actually mean for what we should do about ai and so on and so my first question is just is it remotely plausible is it in the crank territory and it sounds like you're saying that it's in like the solidly science territory yes is far from the crank territory my guess would be that it's true but that it has a lot of work to do to become an explanation it's like maybe you won't like this analogy but in the in the realm of explanatory knowledge we know that the universe is especially favorably disposed towards conjecture and criticism and freedom and the growth of knowledge and so there was an inherent tendency in the universe for athens to defeat sparta and yet it lost and the reason why it lost is that it made specific mistakes and it's those mistakes which explain why it lost the war and if it had won the fact that the universe had a tendency for it to win still is not the explanation of why it won the real explanation would be that they chose certain good strategies and they won the war is the universe especially what was something you said well disposed yes the universe is especially well disposed to life and it's also well disposed to explanatory knowledge and how is that different from saying that it has a tendency well I've just explained that something can have a tendency but it requires more than that to explain why it actually happened you know an object starting with objects on a table again an object on a table has a tendency to fall off whether it does or not depends on other factors which are simply not contained in a statement about tendencies does matter have dissipation-driven adaptation? Driven is ambiguous because a process can be driven by dissipation without its existence being explained by dissipation There are two different things being driven here one is the evolution of the animal in the first place and the second thing is how the animal stays alive once it is there both these processes depend on dissipation but how the animal evolved in the first place isn't explained by dissipation at all for example if you didn't have Darwin's theory of evolution you still wouldn't have it even after you discovered this fact of dissipation so going back to effective accelerationism yes because when I first read it I thought wow this is so deutschian and they have various um like articles detailing what their thing is I'm gonna rephrase it in my own words so again I just discovered this a few days ago so let's see if I understand it might misrepresent it but I'm gonna give it a go so the first thing is that because of this new theory about thermodynamics and life the universe's physics favor configurations of matter that are better at replication and intelligence is better at identifying such patterns so I'm gonna I'm gonna go like one by one what do you think of that one um I think the universe does favor those things but the fact that it's driven by dissipation uh I don't think explains anything or at least I haven't yet heard how that contributes to explaining something suppose it turns out to be true that some other process than dissipation also favors life or that dissipation favors it less than has been thought or than is thought by England then I don't think it would be a rational thing to do for the effective accelerationists to drop their theory and change to someone else's just because the it's no longer supported by the physics so it sounds like what you're saying is that you agree with their conclusions but not that this is derived from Jeremy England's yes so the second point is that you can also think of collections of organisms as being subject to this process so states and corporations and groups and that sort of thing and in capitalism these things compete with each other and that this is also a type of evolution of knowledge or they would call it intelligence so the particular groups also have this sort of energy capture dissipation thing well that's true but now we're getting a bit further from the theory being explanatory so one reason that occurs to me is that the information that corporations let's say are manipulating is information about where dollars are going and then how dollars are applied to move physical objects around and either make electric cars or non-electric cars and that kind of thing now the amount of information in the distribution of dollars in an economy is enormous by human standards but it's absolutely piffling by the standards of biology which is itself piffling by the standards of physics so why that small amount of dissipation should be controlling the larger amount is not explained as far as I can tell by this physics based theory because from the point of view of physics these are very small quantities of entropy energy and so on you know global warming global warming is caused by several orders of magnitude more energy than humans are producing like global warming isn't produced isn't caused by the heat that human machines produce that that's a tiny amount it's produced by an indirect side effect of that on the atmosphere and then that small amount is controlling a very large amount and that was not caused by evolution in fact you know evolution doesn't want that to happen as it were so it makes it puts an extra barrier in my mind to accepting that this is the reason why corporations are as they are or so on could we for each of these separate the and it's all based on this physics side of it versus the just like the conclusions and the claim so if we actually just take the you can think of these collections of organisms like states and groups and so on to be competing with each other and then also subject to an evolutionary process then we'd agree with that yes except that then it's like the thermodynamics thing then we'd have to analyze these large-scale things like humans and corporations in high level emergent terms including knowledge but and indeed they are very well explained though you know they're not perfectly in everything but there's a lot of knowledge about how human systems interact how economic systems interact and I would turn anyone's attention to Popper for thinking about how this happens within a person in the scientific community and so on and I would direct them towards Hayek to talk about how this happens in the economy and if only those two had cooperated more we might have a more unified theory but I don't think the unified theory can come from physics at least not in any obvious way well funny you should mention Hayek because the next point is that EAC effective accelerationism believes that higher variance marketplaces and competition are better at identifying these patterns versus top-down control yes but again that sentence is elaborated in enormous detail by the theories of people like Hayek so I would prefer to express that as diversity is good and promotes creativity but just that statement doesn't exhaust what Hayek has to say because again what Hayek is mainly saying is a more parochial thing it's what this means about things like the money supply and banks and interest rates and I don't know how this theory you're describing expresses the higher level theories of people like Hayek and Popper in which the existing knowledge about those systems is expressed and which already has conclusions like diversity is good so the third thing is that effective accelerationism believes that higher variance marketplaces and competition are better at identifying these patterns rather than top-down control because more variations are better evolutionarily depending on what you mean by these patterns or evolutionarily I would agree with that prima facie I would say that it's all about knowledge and information rather than energy energy is a thing that's important in physics but it's not tremendously important in the economy like we need nuclear power but we need lots of things much more than we need nuclear power like liberty so if we again separate the physics claims from the other claims of EAC the physics claims are kind of like plausible but you know no no particular reason to think it and then but the other claims namely that variance in marketplaces and competition is good yes absolutely and I'm always saying that even by free market advocates and so on diversity is underrated one of the things I was wondering about this is whether it's kind of applying group selection which is presumably an error it might be yeah um and the fact that it's not obvious whether it is or not is it self-suspicious well I mean again it could just be that I haven't researched it enough yeah but by the way Hayek didn't get that group selection is bad it doesn't work ah so for example wonder how much Hayek they've been reading yeah so the fourth thing is that due to the nature of complex chaotic systems you can't predict them so even if you could see everything that was going on like you had a surveillance state panopticon top-down control uh like doesn't doesn't work isn't fault tolerant and you can't predict the future anyway yes but chaotic is the least of it even a perfectly deterministic system running on a deterministic computer would have this property that it is unpredictable and what were the other things you said I mean all the all the things that they attribute to chaotic motion are complex complex yes complex they're all true of computer programs as well and that's the really the important thing because error correction of perfectly deterministic errors which were just caused by an error in the input are they have to be corrected as well and it's those that that are really when we talk about error correction in political systems in economic systems we're not talking about errors caused by small mistakes building up in microscopic mistakes building up we're talking about errors caused by microscopic mistakes building up we're talking about things where a theory is just false and that has to be corrected rather than entrenched that's much more important than the chaotic thing ah because it's all about knowledge yes exactly so far it seems like the main difference apart physics thing is that you would focus on the knowledge that's being created and they focus on the dissipation of energy slash like fighting against entropy yes so the fifth point is that instead of trying to slow all of this down like slow down all of this technological progress and make laws against developing technologies we should embrace the fact that the systems work this way so we should let these organisms or systems dynamically adapt and help this process accelerate and so basically like facilitate technological progress via the free market yes unshackle it rather than promote its progress because promote it help it all imagines this superhuman yeah that's actually one thing that I thought was really cool about EAC which is that they say look this process is happening anyway like you know what we can do is like participate or not like that those are our choices well we can interfere we I mean we the government can interfere or we pundits can interfere and cause fads but which is a losing battle yes in the end but people people can be killed in losing battles I mean in winning battles and so the final point is that and again these are this is my summary is that EAC doesn't care whether you're homo sapiens or silicon it just wants this process to happen and so what matters is consciousness or intelligence not the form that it takes and so it doesn't really matter if our squishy bodies die out and we all convert to silicon that is a good thing it is good if consciousness spreads throughout the universe yes so um are all forms of acceleration of progress good and why or why not to some extent it depends on things that we don't know for example if it turns out that qualia are not an automatic consequence of explanatory creativity then we would have a new moral problem of how to value the two in cases where they seem to conflict can you dumb that down for me well you just said that we shouldn't care or EAC doesn't care whether we're carbon or silicon but if it turns out which I don't which I do not for a moment believe but if it turns out that silicon implementations of explanatory creativity don't have feelings whereas carbon implementations do then we would have a new moral problem of whether or how much to favor carbon ones over silicon and this would arise even if it's only a short-term problem even if for the moment we were to know how to make AGIs without feelings but not yet know how to make AGIs with feelings then there would in the meantime until you know that must be soluble because of g but in the meantime we might know how to do one and not the other in which case there would be a moral problem about how many and how large AGIs without feelings we should make if any perhaps I mean you know depending on how it goes I don't think it's going to turn out like that but since we don't understand how to make AGI or what it really is it could happen I myself am extremely skeptical of the idea that you could have consciousness without feelings or emotions but that is a podcast episode for another time my next question is what are your views on top down versus bottom up control of complex systems is bottom up always better it depends on the institutions so it control modes of control are not fully described by saying that whether they're top down or bottom up and you might think that the extreme forms of bottom up are just as bad as the extreme forms of top down like for example Athenian democracy was not the best form of democracy and the general way of expressing what's important here is to say that what's important is not the direction of control or even how much control but what kind of institutions are implementing that control so Popper has this criterion for judging institutions of government or institutions of this control not by who is ruling whom who whom as lenin would say but by the extent to which to which bad ideas can be refuted can be abandoned without violence and it suddenly introduced the term violence which is which we haven't mentioned yet Popper brings it into fundamental epistemology or fundamental political philosophy that the answer to these questions about what is the best system of government or system of control is primarily in this property of the institutions it's also important to note that this is all done via institutions you can't just say it should be controlled by the people or by a majority of the people because that simply doesn't tell you what to do and it doesn't expose the problems that particular methods of doing this will raise so Popper's criterion is as far as I know the last word so far on the general problem of what is a good political system cool well I think that's a good place to end it so thank you for that you're welcome been fun so I sent a draft of this podcast to the founders of effective accelerationism and there were some things that they wanted clarifying so here it is straight from the horse's mouth

### Beff Jezos

01:31:56 - 01:40:03

Hey this is Beff Jezos here thanks for having me very honored to have David Deutsch talk about EAC on your podcast so I have a few comments on a few points that were made and I'd like to provide a few clarifications so I'll get right into it here so one thing to comment on was David's comment about black body radiation and how inanimate objects are actually pretty good at dissipating away heat ultimately life forms can adapt and search their environment to find new pockets of free energy not just dissipate free energy from radiation that is impinging upon them naturally like an inanimate object would and so ultimately they're a more non-local optimum in terms of their ability to dissipate free energy as heat and so that's why they're thermodynamically favored at least by the laws of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics another thing that David criticized was the potential connection between thermodynamic driven dissipative adaptation and evolution and ultimately how the connection is weak there ultimately one can see evolution as a form of matter searching over the space of configurations for the configurations that are naturally very good at replication and finding pockets of free energy in their environment that they can consume towards sustenance and replication and I mean that that post-selection is very evident if you have organisms that aren't good at securing energy to maintain their coherence and or aren't good at replicating then they will be post-selected against in the natural selection so I guess England's point is that actually evolution is just a byproduct of thermodynamic driven dissipative adaptation and that is something I would agree with personally one more comment from david was claiming that thermodynamic driven dissipative adaptation has nothing to do with intelligence or the emergence of intelligence you know on one hand I would say that the thermodynamic adaptation itself is a form of intelligence that's a bold claim that I look forward to writing more about but in the meantime it's very clear that if you believe that thermodynamic driven dissipative adaptation is behind the process of evolution then it's necessarily transitively behind the emergence of intelligence which emerged through evolution why did intelligence emerge through evolution and through thermodynamic adaptation well higher forms of intelligence allow life forms to be able to interpolate and extrapolate you know utility towards securing resources and free energy towards sustenance and growth of themselves as an individual or towards the sustenance and growth of their group or their meta organism and so higher forms of intelligence allow for higher forms of growth ultimately you know humans are the most intelligent beings for the moment and clearly we've found ways to consume vast amounts of free energy towards our sustenance and growth of our population and our civilization as a whole and so in a sense the claim is that you know intelligence is very important for the ability to secure and consume free energy towards sustenance and growth and extract utility from that free energy right not just to burn it but consume it in a way that maximizes expected growth and the future and ultimately intelligence at least to me is the ability to perceive predict and control the world around us and those are all necessary in order to secure ever more esoteric and difficult to access pockets of free energy whether it's building technologies for say oil drilling or splitting the atom or figuring out nuclear fusion there is free energy around us that's just the harder and harder to access and needs higher and higher levels of intelligence and technology to unlock and so in that sense if you have if you believe in this post-selective effect on configurations of matter towards configurations of matter that are better at securing and consuming free energy then intelligence is a byproduct so that is the hypothesis there so one last point about the application of the theory of thermodynamic dissipative adaptation to capitalism and the economy the point here is that in this kind of model capital or money is a proxy or a replacement for energy and in thermodynamic theories right because each organism or meta organism so let's say a corporation dissipates energy into the environment so they consume free energy or free capital towards their sustenance right keeping a company alive costs money and they are post-selected for via the market for their ability to secure more capital and use that capital towards their sustenance and growth right kind of by construction and that is very similar to life forms and their post-selection with respect to their ability to secure energetic or free energetic capital and allocate it internally towards their sustenance and their growth or replication in that case and so it is very much a similar concept at least to me this sort of adaptive algorithm is a form of intelligence itself and ultimately here you know it wasn't about how much a corporation actually spends in terms of energy to sustain itself like literal energy but rather capital some money but ultimately energy and money are intimately tied right we have markets for energy we can trade capital for energy cryptocurrencies want to tie the two concepts sometimes literally through proof of work for example but ultimately there is a sort of post-selection effect towards meta organisms or groups that are best at acquiring finding ways to acquire capital and put it to use towards their sustenance and growth and that requires a form of intelligence and that form of intelligence for groups and corporations isn't just at an individual level but also a cultural level you know culture would be a form of group intelligence and there is a cultural post-selection effect right companies that have the wrong culture groups have the wrong culture that doesn't lead to their success at sustenance and growth get post-selected out and so that is also why we encourage variance of ideas variance of cultures this search over the optimal culture given that the market forces in the environment is forever changing it's important to maintain variance to maintain dynamic adaptability on fast time scales