# 2024-03-05 - Peter Boghossian - David Deutsch, Peter Boghossian, and Reid Nicewonder Talk Fermi Paradox, Ideological Contagion, and More [Official](https://8cb104e9-39a8-4ddc-9e91-a0e10355329b.libsyn.com/david-deutsch-peter-boghossian-reid-nicewonder-talk-fermi-paradox-ideological-contagion-more) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPvTbftn-xY) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-deutsch-peter-boghossian-reid-nicewonder-talk/id1650150225?i=1000648136488) Duration: 01:30:49 ## Transcript ### Transavia ad narrator 00:00:00 - 00:00:08 Everyone celebrates their holidays differently. That's why we fly to 100 destinations. Book your favourite on Transavia.com. ### Peter Boghossian 00:00:31 - 00:01:31 Welcome to Conversations with Peter Boghossian. [Music] Today we interview physicist and author and one of our intellectual heroes, David Deutsch, the Oxford physicist, and Reid and I did this interview together and it was a very, very special treat for us. Cool. So, David Deutsch, Professor Deutsch, thank you so much for coming on to Conversations with Peter Boghossian and we're here with Reid Nicewonder, the president of Street Epistemology International and we're big, big, big, huge fans. So excuse us if we fanboy out a little bit about your work. We're big fans. Go ahead, Reid. ### Reid Nicewonder 00:01:31 - 00:01:40 Yes. Welcome, David. Thank you. I appreciate you coming on. So yeah, I know both of you are big fans of science fiction. ### Peter Boghossian 00:01:40 - 00:01:45 Anything that you've been watching or reading lately that have been enjoyable to you? ### David Deutsch 00:01:45 - 00:01:51 I liked Severance. I thought that was great. Severance, yeah, and I liked Devs from FX. ### Peter Boghossian 00:01:51 - 00:01:56 Oh, that's great. That's been out a while now. I thought that was fantastic. That was a while ago, yeah. What about you, David? ### David Deutsch 00:01:56 - 00:05:59 So the last thing I, in terms of movies, the last thing that I really liked was The Martian because that is not only hard science fiction, which is the only kind of science fiction I like. I mean, the only kind I like, qua science fiction. I can watch a silly movie and enjoy it, but as science fiction, not only was it hard science fiction, it is optimistic. It's optimistic in exactly the right way that it is about problem solving and it's about someone who thinks that the problem is solvable and what it takes to solve it is creative thought and reason. Reason, exactly. And if he's not going to solve it, it's not that it was insoluble. It's just that it was bad luck and he failed to solve it and if he had his time again, maybe he would. Yeah, I love that book. It was a big page turner for me. It's just always enjoying the next problem that he was now facing due to having solved potentially a previous problem. So it just kind of builds on itself, but it was just so exciting. I loved it. Yeah. And in that way, it's quite realistic. That's what really happened. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So I don't know how much David you know of Peter or how much Peter really you know of David. I've just been enjoying David's stuff. I read his book, The Beginning of Infinity last summer and I've been pretty much enamored with all the ideas from that, but I just want to basically introduce you guys and fanboy out while I potentially help you have conversations together and talk about some of your ideas and how they potentially compare and contrast. So we'll have a good conversation. So David, I know you've mentioned that you enjoyed Peter kind of attacking some postmodern stuff. Do you want to go into that a little bit more? Well, I think it's very important at the moment. The postmodern attack on civilization is probably the most dangerous of the intellectual attacks. I mean, I can't quantify how much danger there is of nuclear war at the moment. Obviously that would be worse if it happened. But apart from physical danger, I think civilization and in the long run, the intellectual danger is probably is worse because there's nothing to defend and then it doesn't matter if we give into nuclear blackmail or whatever. So I thought that, I don't know what to call it exactly, that experiment or that demonstration was admirable and the attacks on it are just an indication of how bad things have got. If I remember correctly, it was attacked for violating the university's rules, just completely pulled out of a hat. Yeah, you can't do the testing or have the human subjects be a part of the experiment by submitting papers to journals. That's a human subjects violation. Yeah. It was pretty crazy. I think in retrospect, part of the problem is that it was too early if the grievance studies stuff had come out a little later. ### David Deutsch 00:05:59 - 00:10:01 People thought that we had lost our minds, that we were crazy, that we're some cranks screaming about a problem that doesn't exist. So I think that now people are starting to really wake up, to borrow a turn of phrase, to the problem of organizational institutional capture, activist disciplines, disciplines that subjugate truth to narrative. This is what you've written about in your work, the importance of objectivity and using the tools of reason and science to make discerning judgments about things. So I think that people are starting to wake up to the problems and it's going to be a slow burn, but I think we're going to get there. I'm ultimately optimistic that we will get there, but it's going to take a while. Right. Yeah. So yeah, cool. Any comment on that, David? Well, I don't like to prophesy, but I also think that the ingredients for getting there are there. The society of the West is quintessentially, it's not the society that makes the right decisions all the time. It's the society that corrects errors. That's what the West is good at. I have pointed out from time to time that the optimistic view and the error correcting view and the Popperian view that prophecy is impossible and everybody's fallible and all those things imply that there's no limit to the size of error that we can make. That individuals or groups or society as a whole can make arbitrarily large errors. And the important thing then, the important difference between different societies and different groups and different subcultures is therefore how good they are at correcting errors. Of course, many societies are the opposite. It's not that they're bad at correcting errors, it's that they want to entrench errors. They don't recognize that there are going to be errors in everything they do and therefore they want to entrench everything they do. And that is their weakness. And that is why, in my view, we have the tools already to win the battle if we use them. And at the moment it's sort of unfashionable to win anything and to criticize anything. But yes, I agree with you. I think that we've got what it takes. There does seem to be a relationship between the deeper, more entrenched the ideology, the more it demeans the error correction mechanism. Yes. Perhaps, yeah. Yes, that's saving grace. Yeah, and one project, I know Peter pioneered back in 2013, potentially to help solve this problem of the lack of even wanting to seek errors for certain ideas, was this project of street epistemology. I think that's what you wanted to call your first book, the name of it, street epistemology. I wanted to call it, after reading it, I thought that a best title would be a manual for creating critical thinkers. But it's basically about Socratic method style, having conversations, civil conversations, asking questions to help people critically reflect on the reliability of the methods ### Reid Nicewonder 00:10:01 - 00:10:42 They use to come to knowledge. And since 2013, tons of people have been taking those ideas and practicing them in the real world and they have evolved through trial and error, as these ideas seem to do. And you wrote a second book, How to Have Impossible Conversations in 2019. I helped co-found a nonprofit, Street Epistemology International, to help people learn about this way of having more civil conversations. And I want to potentially do more in that arena. Is there anything else I missed about that project, Peter? No, but I want to, I'm curious, David, what you think about this. ### Peter Boghossian 00:10:42 - 00:12:09 One of the things that I have learned from trying to have these impossible conversations with people, it gets back to your idea of error correction. I think one of the reasons that people don't seek out an error corrective mechanism, whether it's as an individual or institutions don't seek it out, is because it's imbued with some kind of a moral virtue. Like the content of the belief has a moral valence to it in the way that if you ask somebody a neutral question, they'll adjudicate like the circumference of the length of a hot dog bun from one restaurant or the other. They'll just pull out a tape measure or what have you and measure the size of the bun because there's no moral component to that. And so I think that there is a relationship between the disposition to seek out errors and one's feeling that they shouldn't criticize certain ideas on moral grounds. Yes, within a free society, this boils down to on the individual level, what kind of hangups ### David Deutsch 00:12:09 - 00:14:30 People have and on the social level, it's about what kind of interaction an individual has with their group of acquaintances, colleagues, other people. If you're in a position where if you say a certain thing, you're going to lose all your friends, then that is a major life crisis. We know that well, yes. And you have to be brave. And whenever I admit that I am a complete coward in this respect, I have to also say that it's not just cowardice. Maybe I'm just being defensive here, but it's not just cowardice. People have lives. They have something that they want to do other than win this war. Even though if the war is lost, then everybody will suffer. But on the other hand, if there's nothing to defend, if people don't have lives that don't want to go away, then it's not worth defending it. So you have to pick soluble problems. And I do what I can, but there's a lot I do what I can. No, I don't do what I can. I don't do what I could. I do what is convenient, which is not zero. And you do an awful lot, which is perhaps less than 100%, but close. So that's very admirable. But I think that physics won't do itself. Epistemology won't do itself. And somebody has to drive knowledge forward in whatever respect interests them most. That was a long apology, sorry. No, screw you. ### Peter Boghossian 00:14:30 - 00:15:27 No worries. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, maybe, you know, we basically want to have a cultural movement to help more people be able to think through ideas in a more critical fashion with critical thinking so that they can potentially solve their own personal problems, but potentially apply them in their own professional lives. Who knows where it could spread? But ideally, one of the big goals is to help maintain relationships at the very least so that these contentious issues aren't driving people apart in terms of their relationship. If someone hears an idea and they disagree strongly, they don't throw facts and evidence and debate and start calling people names. They can have a civil conversation and still actually seek to understand and learn, potentially they're mistaken about something, hopefully do this in a more collaborative civil way, but still doing it rigorously. I mean, you're doing this in practice. ### David Deutsch 00:15:27 - 00:19:55 Immediately I would think of the theoretical problem with doing that, which is that the current enemy, which we've been calling it postmodernism, but you could call it woke. One of its features is it keeps changing its name. It keeps changing its identity. So one of the things it immediately does is that when you try and criticize it, when you criticize an idea, the person will say, oh, well, that's not my idea. That's just a thing that you are calling it. But our actual idea is something else. So you never get to substance. But really, the problem with that whole spectrum of ideologies or single ideology under lots of different names is that it doesn't argue. It just and its ideology is that that is the right thing to do. It is that you should not argue, because if you're trying to argue, then you are playing the oppressor's game or playing the patriarchy's game or the white people's game or the Jews' game or whoever it is. And that immediately in terms of the debate, that's ad hominem and ad hominem breeds ad hominem. So the discussion is automatically taken away from the substance of the discussion and onto issues like, am I a bad person? Right. And in terms of the opponent, the other speaker, it has an even worse effect on them because they are confirmed every time this happens, they are confirmed in their ideology that one should try even harder not to argue and base everything on ad hominem chunks of pre-digested pseudo arguments. Like you were only saying that because you're a whatever. Right. Yeah. It's very interesting to me. I think if you look at it as memetic, like if you just look at it as a kind of idea pathogen or a kind of almost a contagion, it is it has developed defense mechanisms to keep it in place. Yes. And among those chief among those defense mechanisms are you do not talk to people who have substantive disagreements with you. You do not talk to people who will challenge or question you. And again, it's playing on that that moral idea and doing so makes you a better person because you don't want to platform people who have different ideas. You don't want to give those ideas the opportunity to spread. But what that really is is an excuse for one, you, or the person who refuses to engage in the conversation, not to do the intellectual work, but even more so. It's a kind of sheath that prevents the ideas themselves from the potential of being revised. Exactly, exactly. And I used to think that and maybe I still think that this kind of mental self-defense mechanism to protect the bad ideas is caused by psychological hangups, which are themselves caused in childhood by parents. And that is a different idea from the idea that it's a mind virus, because mind, interesting. When I say by parents, I mean, by parental coercion, by intentional actions, perhaps not consciously intended to have that effect. But it's the coercion that does the fact of coercion that does the damage. ### David Deutsch 00:19:55 - 00:23:45 I used to think or I still think. I don't know. I'm not sure. But with a phenomenon that looks like a mind virus, we have people entering into the ideology or into the infected state somehow voluntarily, joyfully and with good intentions and never thinking that they are limiting themselves, thinking actually that they are expanding their consciousness, they're waking up to become woke. And it feels subjectively, apparently, it feels subjectively like coming to understand a real thing, coming to understand something and that you didn't understand before. And there is a relationship. So another place where this happens is in cults. So I think, again, I think for a wicked cult to be effective, it must use some kind of coercion, but it may only be the coercion of, oh, I'll lose my friends if I think if I even think something taboo, because as you said, engaging in an argument with a racist or a whatever it is means you are bad. It's not just that they are bad. It's that you are bad and you don't want to. You keep trying to think the opposite way to that. And that every time you do that, it takes you deeper into the cult. But woke doesn't have, you know, compounds where you're not allowed to sleep and it doesn't have that mechanism of inducting people into an adult-onset hang up. So I don't know exactly how it works. I don't know why it works. I don't know why it's so I mean, you probably have sophisticated theories of how it works. So, you know, tell me if you do. All right, I do. That's a conversation for another day. But I definitely think it starts with the wide scale capture of not only academic institutions, but colleges of education where they grant degrees or licensures, depending on the country or what have you, certificates to teach in K through 12. And then it's a massive indoctrination. Well, it's kind of an ideological replication factory. Right. And one of the features or qualities of street epistemology is that it has the ability to tackle ideas or beliefs that are largely maybe driven mostly by psychological or social motivations, some kind of these beliefs might meet very deep needs for people. And we still try to get at those needs in terms of talking about potential biases. But if they come up as potential reasons for thinking something is true, we can talk about it in that way. But ideally, keeping it in the frame of OK, is this really solving a problem for you? Is this the best way to solve this kind of problem for you? It's almost maybe more therapy than an epistemology conversation, but it's back and forth. That sounds like a very good kind of attitude to take to get people out of the hang up, the cult or, you know, whatever you call it, the mind virus. But how to get how one gets into it. So I'm very skeptical that school teachers and university professors are the origin of the problem. ### David Deutsch 00:23:45 - 00:27:34 I would I would more likely think that that they are just another symptom because I don't see schools, for example, being very effective at teaching anything. If you think that that everybody this is my standard example, if you think that everybody at age, you know, nearly everybody at age, whatever it is, 14, can solve a pair of simultaneous equations or draw a graph of y equals x squared or whatever. And yet, if you ask them when they're double that age, most of them won't know. And that that's a sign of the ineffectiveness of teaching as we now know it, the ineffectiveness of teaching a thing that the person didn't really want to learn in the first place and has no use for. So why is it that that an entire generation can be taught nonsense and behave as if it were fundamental to their life? It you know, they would say this is what I am as a person. Now, if schools can't do that for algebra, for science, for all the things that there's for English, you know, all the things that they think they are teaching. How come they can do it for wokeism? So I that's why I'm reluctant to accept that explanation of how the thing begins, how the thing began. We know you have your substitution hypothesis where maybe certain traditional religions have been falling away and some of these postmodern ideas maybe meet a lot of the needs that traditional religions have been meeting. And these have just been now expressed in potentially, you know, academic settings. And then that gets filtered through the culture. Hard to know. Right. And it's reinforced by community friendships, people who believe these things, administrators and faculty who get, for example, diversity statements and hiring faculty who get hired and promoted on the basis of non meritocratic criteria. And so you're really creating a system where you're aligning things. But to me. All of that, not it's not merely that it begins in the university is perpetuated and forwarded by the university and colleges of education in particular, but friends groups are then bundled within the ideological framework. The other part to that, you know, I don't I want we want to interview you, not have hear me go off. But, you know, the other part of that is the peer reviewed literature is the corruption in the peer reviewed literature and the fact that these ideas are really from activist disciplines that are being forwarded. They're not they don't have truth at its core. They're not falsifiable. They're not empirical. They're really the musings of ideologues discharged in peer reviewed journals. And so I would agree with you in that it is not singularly the fact of the university culture. There are so many other elements that go into it and not only university culture, but in the United States, you call it K through 12 kindergarten through 12 culture. But yeah, but people. ### David Deutsch 00:27:36 - 00:30:36 People in the educational system, it's notorious that the thing is set up as a machine to pass exams. You know that you have to act and speak and write in a certain way to pass the exams. And then you just shake it off like a dog coming out of a river. You know, people don't really internalize most people. I mean, you know, there are people who are actually interested in each subject and those people. But those people are going to be the most critical because they want the ideas for a reason and they're going to want to improve on them. That's another thing that woke people don't want to improve on woke ideas. They just. Adopt them. So, you know, it's notorious that somebody can come out of a science course and not know the first thing about the subject, about the science in question. They just know what to do to answer the questions because they're not interested. And therefore. You know, that's a bad thing when it's a good subject, but it's a good thing when it's a bad subject, when it's a subject that doesn't really exist. Why is it that they just come out of that and say, yeah, well, you know, I had a nice three or four years drinking with my friends and whatever and saying that nonsense and now I can start my life properly. Why don't they say that about the woke thing? Well, maybe some do. Maybe most do. That's another thing. Maybe I'd like to ask you how many people does it take to have got the mind virus in a certain culture or subculture before the whole culture is disabled. Maybe it's only 10 percent because, you know, maybe it's maybe it's not necessary that the person thinks I'll lose all my friends. Maybe it's enough if you say I'll lose 10 percent of my friends and they will really hate me. I don't know. I'm asking. I don't know how this works. I think my response to that is it's not a percentage of the population or a number, although there does seem to be a minimal critical threshold. But it's a play on the all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing. All it takes for the city of Portland to burn is for people to not do their jobs. Mayor Ted Wheeler, he/him/his, to not do his job. The police to not arrest people, the prosecutor to not prosecute people, the ... ### Peter Boghossian 00:30:36 - 00:32:02 Judicial. So there there has to be a kind of systems failure. People rip down statues. There's no consequence. People are assaulting people on the street. There's no consequence. Police refusing to go into minority neighborhoods and consequently the murder rates in those neighborhoods go up. There's no consequence. So it also has to be a breakdown in systems where people who don't subscribe to the ideology are absolutely terrified of a pile-on on social media of being called a bigot, a homophobe, a Nazi, a racist, when the overwhelming majority aren't clearly any of those things. And so I think it's a kind of culture of fear that's created. And once you've created a culture of fear, you put a wrench in the machine, the machine stops functioning. So I think a framework for the question is not how many people subscribe to deranged ideas, specifically ideas that want to really destroy the foundations of Western society, but how many people will do nothing in response to that. And they'll, they're to be very blunt with you, David, is they're just cowards. They're afraid to speak out. Well, in a, in a totalitarian society, it's obvious what they're afraid of. ### David Deutsch 00:32:02 - 00:33:38 They're afraid of the midnight knock on the door and the secret police coming to arrest them. Right. In a Western society, that's not going to happen most of the time. I mean, it does happen some of the time, but I think that's not what people are afraid of, they're afraid of other people. And why are they afraid of even speaking? I don't know. I, again, I'm speaking from first principles, from sort of dead reckoning. If what you say is true, that most people don't actually subscribe to the idea that they are acting out. Why is it that, that, you know, you say the police don't go out into that neighborhood to arrest people. Okay. Because they're afraid of something. Why don't, why aren't they then sitting in their, in their common room or whatever police have drinking their coffee and saying to each other, wow, you know, we really should be going out there, but I'm not going to put my, whatever it is on the line and the other ones say, no, nor am I, you know, so is that what happens? I don't think it is. I think if 90% of the, of the people were talking to each other about how awful it is that they're not allowed to say certain things, then from that state, you get automatically to the state where they are saying, saying things in public. ### Peter Boghossian 00:33:39 - 00:35:42 I'll push back on that a little bit. So there's something called the Ferguson effect and it's basically police didn't want to go into the Ferguson neighborhood and arrest specifically African Americans because they were afraid that if they did, that they would be deemed as racist and the consequence of the lack of police presence in those neighborhoods, it was devastating to the black community, specifically young black men who kill other black men. So I do think that there's a kind of fear created both within institutions and external to institutions around the, it could be around anything, obviously, any kind of totalitarian state can arbitrarily pick it, but at the moment it's around race, primarily race. It's also to a certain extent around trans status where institutions, Andrew Doyle writes about this in his book, The New Puritans, where men are in women's spaces and people are afraid to say anything because they'll be deemed bigots. So I think understanding this phenomenon is, is vital to understand the culture of fear that's created. And really, when you think about it, it's so idiotic. There are only a few tools in the tool set. Nazi bigot, homophobe, racist, sexist, misogynist. Yeah. And hopefully one potential solution to this problem of not being able to talk about things is to have a really great way of having conversations, you know, hopefully for street epistemology. And there's, but a core part of street epistemology is the epistemology. And I want to make sure, are we actually using the best theory of epistemology to have these conversations with people? And so I want to just to potentially transition to that, to just ask this question, does the following sentence make sense? It is rational to align one's confidence to the evidence. I know you want to expound on that a little bit. No, I think that's good. ### David Deutsch 00:35:44 - 00:39:46 No, but let, let me say that differences between people in regards to the foundations of epistemology, that is, you know, what knowledge is, where it comes from, how it grows, that kind of question, foundational questions. I think most people, most philosophers, I'm a, as you know, I'm a follower of Karl Popper and that is a minority view in, on every level among, among philosophers, scientists, people in the street. The prevailing epistemology is some kind of inductivism, empiricism, and perhaps worse, positivism, instrumentalism, those kinds of things. And those are as foundational theories, those are really, really bad. But the saving grace is that, that as I was starting to say, foundational disagreements usually don't strongly affect the conclusions that people draw. So you can say, you know, I'm against woke because, and then the woke person will say, no, no, but nevermind that, because they don't, whatever you just said, align themselves to the evidence. Now, if I would say that they try to destroy the means of correcting errors, they don't judge ideas by their content, but rather than their source and all sorts of like Popperian maxims like that, which conflict with the empiricist ones, but when it comes to actual cases, we will 99% agree about which, whose side we are on in particular cases. We'll just explain it differently. But let me say, having said that, let me say that there are some things where some, some cases where having bad epistemology takes you way off course and often into the enemy's camp. So that, you know, I do advocate getting the right epistemology. And what do you mean when you say the enemy's camp, you mean the conclusion will be arbitrary? Well, with some of these epistemologies, the conclusion will lead you to endorse the enemy's point of view. For example, if you, well, there's this famous debate between when Wittgenstein and Popper met and Wittgenstein allegedly threatened Popper with a poker. And the issue that he was threatening him with was that, that Wittgenstein had said that there's no such thing as a philosophical problem. There are only language problems. And there's problems with the way we use words and the way we define concepts and that, that sort of thing. And Popper, and Popper said, no, that there are genuine philosophical problems and it's possible to solve them and it's possible to make progress with them if we don't solve them. And Wittgenstein said contemptuously, give me an example of a, of a genuine problem. And Popper said a genuine moral problem. I'm not telling the story very well. And somebody wrote a whole book about this, this exchange, by the way. And Popper said an example is not to threaten visiting speakers with a poker. And supposedly Wittgenstein stormed out of the room. ### David Deutsch 00:39:46 - 00:42:07 Now, the thing is, if you adopt Wittgenstein's view there, then you will have no philosophical weapons against the argument that if there are no philosophical problems, then there's no such thing as objective truth in things like morality. So you will, you will think that, that, you know, you can't say objectively that slavery is, is bad. You can only say a certain culture thinks it's bad and another culture doesn't think it's bad. And if the worst thing in the world is for one culture to oppress another, then you can't oppose slavery across the board. Or in the most recent example of this, you can't oppose rape across the board or kiDNApping or torture or murder. So there's a case where adopting the wrong epistemology ties your hands in regard to arguing against, against really the worst possible conclusions. But I know, yeah, go ahead. Let me just say again that this is the, this is the exceptional case. In most cases, it doesn't matter whether you begin with Wittgenstein or Popper or Bertrand Russell or whatever the, all these things are attempts to codify common sense and to improve common sense where necessary. And so all those bad, bad philosophies began like that. And to some extent, they embody still common sense in their ways of arguing and so on. And if you, if you, if you're lucky enough to, that the thing you're arguing about can stay on that ground, then it doesn't matter that you began with the wrong epistemology. Great. Yeah. Maybe one last detour on this epistemology, especially when it relates to ethics, I know Peter, you're a fan of saying, maybe if you want to justify why slavery is bad, you would say, well, ultimately it's rationally derivable. Correct. Yeah. ### Peter Boghossian 00:42:07 - 00:42:09 What would you say about that, David? ### David Deutsch 00:42:10 - 00:45:49 Well, so again, as a fan of Popper, I don't think we derive things. I think we, the speaking about any field, but let's say morality in particular, we have certain ideas about what we should do, what other people should do, how to think about other people, what to expect from other people. And these ideas are imperfect. They have, they have problems in them. You know, you, you, you have the idea that murder is wrong and then you come across a problem of somebody who kills his wife because she's suffering unbearable pain in a terminal disease. And is that wrong? Is that murder is, so there's a difference. So there's a genuine, so we come across problems and the reason why there is such a field as ethics, uh, is that there's knowledge to be obtained about how to solve such problems. It's never perfect, but so. Yeah. So when you say there's knowledge, you're saying that there's a fact of the matter to be figured out. Yes. That that's what knowledge means. Uh, yes. Uh, there's the, there are facts of the matter. There are, there are objective truths. We can never grasp an objective truth completely. Uh, our ideas about it will always be flawed in some way, but if we can make progress enough to solve the problems we have, then we're making progress. That's what progress is. Right. So if there is a fact of the matter about things, or if there's knowledge, then the question is, are there better and worse ways to figure that out? And the answer, the moment that you say, yes, there are worse ways that must by definition mean there are better ways. Yes. So sacrificing a goat on the hood of your car to figure out something is a worse way, so that must mean there's a better way. So then the, you know, if you just escalate that up, that idea, science, evidence, reason, what will the reason you could use reason and then take data points, take evidence to inform your decision. But again, that that's assuming that there are facts of the matter to be known, like moral facts, and then you just have to use reason to get there. Yes. Well, uh, I think we, again, I should keep mentioning Popper because it's really him that I'm trying to, trying to summarize. But one of the mistakes of epistemology is to assume that we start with evidence, or that we should start with evidence, or that if we, if we want to make progress, we need to gather the evidence and then think about the evidence and then extract from the evidence, a conclusion, which is then more justified, more secure, more firm than if you didn't do that. And that's the wrong picture. I mean, as I keep saying, you may not go far wrong if you follow that picture, but it is completely the wrong picture. What happens is that we start with the problem. The problem is the thing that gives you the coordinates by which to judge ideas. ### David Deutsch 00:45:49 - 00:49:49 If you, if you just start with evidence, then, so a problem is a conflict between existing ideas. So, um, somebody says, like a few years ago, somebody said, um, uh, we've discovered in our neutrino experiment that the neutrinos are, are traveling faster than light and the press was saying, Oh, you know, maybe, uh, Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong. Um, that was a mistake that that's the empiricist mistake. You can't, the meaning of the evidence is not visible until you have a rival to at least two rival theories, which both purport to explain it. So you can't just say Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong because that's not an explanation of anything. Scientific theories are explanations. We have explanation in Einstein's theory to say that Einstein's theory isn't true is not an explanation. The lack of an explanation is never an explanation. So you have a rival explanation, which says that, that neutrinos sometimes travel faster and light because X, Y, and Z. And there wasn't such a thing. Um, so people look for such theories, but they also look for theories along the lines of maybe the apparatus that isn't doing what we think is doing. And that's both those things are lines of research, trying to find a rival theory. It's only when you have the theory and the rival theory that, that evidence is even meaningful. So then once you have the two rival theories, then you can gather evidence because you can then the two rival theories will be giving meaning to that evidence. If you only have one theory, or if you have zero theories, then the evidence is meaningless. Yeah, I have a comment on that. Or do you want to move on to that thing? Make sure quick comment. So my quick comment is I agree. And this is going to be a weird criticism of what you just said, but with the exception of a time index. So if you, if you're in kind of a hurry to figure out which rival theory one should consider or more specifically what one ought to do morally, then you would need to start with evidence. So let me give you an example. I'm trying to think of another example. I just cannot think of one off the top of my head. It's such a jarring example. And I apologize. We may have to edit this example out, but in South Africa, it is a common belief that if you, if you have AIDS and you rape a baby, it will cure your AIDS. So before you even go to the idea of rape, if you started with your evidence that that's false, then you could just a priori rule out the, whether or not one should do that, whether or not one should engage in that behavior. So it would be a way of like a gold sieve when you, when you drop in evidence, it would be a way of being able to immediately discount a moral conclusion. Well, I think you can do that even without evidence because what you have there is, um, two rival theories already in the problem, as you, as you described it, there are people who have this, um, false theory about AIDS and babies. And there are people who have a different theory about what AIDS is and also moral theories about babies and so on. So there's the whole spectrum of theories in conflict with each other. ### David Deutsch 00:49:50 - 00:51:14 Now you could resolve that conflict with evidence, but I don't think you need to do that because in order to say that the quote scientific, um, side, the scientific theory is false, um, you need to have an explanatory theory of what is true. And in this particular case, and in almost all of the anti science kind of, um, world views out there, the, you can't sustain an explanation of why the scientific take on the, on the issue in question is false unless you invoke a conspiracy theory. So, and once the other side is invoking a conspiracy theory, they won't accept your evidence. They will just say, well, that they're just lying. But right, right. If you, if you, you have to, therefore in a case like that argument is going to solve this evidence, isn't going to solve it. You can, you can then say, well, these people who are faking the evidence, what happens when they get AIDS? What happens if their child gets AIDS? ### Peter Boghossian 00:51:15 - 00:51:20 Do you think that they take the drugs that they advocate, which you say they know very well don't work and that really the PrEP works, which you think they do? ### David Deutsch 00:51:20 - 00:51:52 And okay. They will say, well, yes, then they secretly take PrEP. Then you say, well, and what do they tell their friends? What do they tell their children? Do they, at what age do they reveal to their children that they've been lying about their life's work? And how do they make sure that children don't tell their friends in school? ### Peter Boghossian 00:51:52 - 00:51:54 Can I ask a follow up question, Reid? ### David Deutsch 00:51:54 - 00:51:59 Sure. So, and follow up question, and then we'll, we'll go on with the other question. ### Peter Boghossian 00:51:59 - 00:52:00 So my- ### Reid Nicewonder 00:52:00 - 00:52:03 These are the kind of examples you get with talking with Peter. So enjoy. ### Peter Boghossian 00:52:03 - 00:53:52 Yeah. My, my, my question to you is, I'm going to keep pushing back on this evidence thing, if that's okay. Um, so I'll reveal my cards here. I think one of the problems that I have with philosophy writ large is the idea that you can reason your way to certain conclusions, particularly certain conclusions about phenomenon or phenomena. For example, you can reason your way and you see this in theology a lot. Um, theologians who are philosophically adept, they can reason their way to the origin of the universe, for example. I think that there is no reasoning your way to the origin of the universe. You have to start with some kind of evidence for that. And I'll just throw this, this out. We can change this as a placeholder, but. I am fascinated by this idea. And I actually asked one of my professors this and he literally yelled at me when I asked him this, I don't understand why there can't be an infinite regress. Like I've never understood that, but that would be, that would be an example of a thing that you, you couldn't reason your way to that. Right. So don't you at some fundamental level, either in attempting to adjudicate between theories or you would need evidence at some level. ### David Deutsch 00:53:53 - 00:57:58 So I think that, um, this picture of what reason even is, is wrong. Okay. It's not a way of getting to a conclusion or of justifying a conclusion or coming from some secure thing like evidence to reach the conclusion. None of those is true. Reason is entirely critical. And which is why it's always finding errors and correcting them, not finding a way to justify a thing and say that that's now finally the truth. So we, that's why it has to begin with a problem. So if we have a problem, a conflict, then we know that either one side is wrong or the other side is wrong or they're both wrong, but they can't be both right. So the problem is, is a fertile thing in that sense because that's how it gives you and then you can begin to think about the problem and what you're supposed to think about in the Popperian scheme of things is. Well, if one of them is wrong, what's wrong with it? Try to find a thing that's wrong with it, which means criticize it. Conjecture criticisms. Well, it might be that it might be that the scientists are all lying. Okay. But the criticism of, for example, that there can't be an infinite regress would be based upon a biological understanding of reality that we have Dawkins, Richard Dawkins calls it the middle kingdom in which our brains have evolved to understand. I can't remember. It was an age of air that the medium sized dry goods, you know, I can't remember the exact phrase off top of my head, but doesn't that assume that you can't like when you think about, I was just listening to a podcast the other day, Michael Shermer's most recent podcast, and this guy was explaining the quantum realm. And I mean, it was just so, it was just so bizarre. I mean, just, it was just so freaking weird. I couldn't take the podcast one 10 minutes. My, my head hurt trying to think about all these things, but I think my head hurt because I didn't evolve to think about what happens inside of a black hole or the quantum realm. And so the idea of error correction in those senses doesn't, doesn't really make sense. Right. Thing is, um, people came to the theories about black holes and the interior of black holes, not by building them up from something that our brains were designed to do, but by finding errors in the previous theory. And the, um, uh, enterprise of finding those errors found really bad errors that nobody, literally nobody can find a way of papering over. That's why we, we, we think that black holes exist, but the theory of black holes is undoubtedly false in some respects. We don't just don't know yet in what respects. And when we solve that problem, we will, I think we will have a different conception of black holes, but we'll still think black holes are there. The infinite regress problem that they're saying that we, we, we must rule out infinite regresses that is really mostly relevant in the, in the wrong epistemology that that is, you know, is this the foundation? ### David Deutsch 00:57:58 - 01:00:11 No. Is, is the thing below it, the foundation? Well, why can't we just have an infinite set of foundations, you know, flat earth and below that, the six elephants and below that, the turtle and then turtles all the way down, right? That's, that's the wrong way of looking at it because there's no problem against which you can judge these turtles. If there was a case. So yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, go on. I'm thinking about what you said about error correction and then Reid, I'll stop after this. I'm thinking about what you said about error correction. So for example, the physics of black holes, like I don't, I don't understand Ramanujan's mathematics, right? I don't understand. I mean, I don't even have the most rudimentary tools to understand how I could even begin to go about correcting something like that. So it would, it would seem again, I guess maybe if you, I don't think we're calling math evidence for something I'm just trying to think of like what tool sets you would need certain tool sets in order to figure out whether or not the domain into which you're inquiring, you could again, to borrow a Popperian thing, you, you could have elements of falsifiability, right? But I don't, I think that's different in the moral domain and the moral domain. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, I agree that falsifiability is much less important than most people think it is it's not the cornerstone of Popper's epistemology or anything, and it's only applicable to science. And there are areas of knowledge, including epistemology itself, which are not suitable for applying that tool to criticize theories. Right. If you're wondering what, how you would criticize Ramanujan's, a theorem of Ramanujan's, I would first ask, I would ask you, what's your problem with it? ### Peter Boghossian 01:00:11 - 01:00:19 Why, you know, if someone said, no, it should be like this rather than like that, how would you choose between them? ### David Deutsch 01:00:19 - 01:01:54 Well, you're saying you don't have a way of choosing between them. That's because you're not interested in the difference between them. So if you were interested in the difference, you would be able to judge the two different ways of looking at the problem by the criterion of what's, what you wanted the theorem to be like. And the, in the case of the, say the famous case of the turtles and so on, and the earth being on the top of the turtles, depends what your problem is. If your problem is what holds the earth up, then it's no good having that infinite stream of turtles because the whole stream could fall down, whether it's infinite or not. Therefore, postulating an infinite number of turtles doesn't address the question you asked, the problem you had is the problem you had was what keeps the earth up, you know, the flat earth, why doesn't the whole flat earth just fall down? Then that is simply not answered by the turtles theory. And that is why the infinite number of turtles is a bad explanation. Not that infinity is by itself unacceptable. In fact, infinity is often acceptable. It depends what the problem is and what the criticism was and whether the infinite number of whatever it is meets that criticism or doesn't. Right. ### Peter Boghossian 01:01:55 - 01:02:16 And speaking of tools, I have a question about this and you talk about this a lot where say someone has all of the critical thinking tools and rationality tools that maybe David Deutsch has in terms of finding error correction. Is there something prior to that in terms of one's disposition or attitude or values to even like want to seek error? ### David Deutsch 01:02:16 - 01:06:18 That's a big problem. I've always tried to think about how to solve. Yeah. Yeah. Anything to add to that? No, that's, that's absolutely spot on. Yeah. So we don't know how the mind creates conjectures and criticism. That's the problem. If we knew that we could, we could write an AGI program right away and we don't, we don't know it, but we do know some things about it. So note that every human who is born and it doesn't have brain damage. Learns their native language. Learning a native language is incredibly difficult. We don't know. We don't even have the understanding yet of what a language is. Again, that's an AGI problem. Um, uh, but we know that it's a very complicated thing because if we try and do it again, when we're adults, we can see how difficult it is and it's not nowhere near as difficult as what a baby's task is because we already have a language we can connect the different bits of grammar and vocabulary into the structure that we have already built. We don't, it's much easier than to build that structure in the first place, which every child does easily. So if you think in terms of Popper's epistemology, then we know, we don't know how it's done, but we know some things about how it's done. And what we mainly know is, is that it's done by solving problems. It's done by conjecture and criticism. It's a criticism to try to guess where the mistake is in our, in our theory. Um, and conjecture. Yes. So everything you just said is a skillset and not a disposition. So don't you have to have the disposition to want to do that in the first place? Yes. Well, I suppose psychologically that's what a problem is. Um, a problem is something that you want to resolve. Like you don't want to resolve Ramanujan's problem, but you do want to resolve the problem of, uh, how to defeat woke, let's say. So, yeah, I don't have the tools to solve. I mean, I, my math is truly atrocious, but there is a kind of disposition that a disposition to want to correct your errors, a disposition to not believe that your beliefs are infallible as crazy as that sounds. Yes. So, um, I think you do need that. And I think we are born with it as, um, is evidenced by the intellectual performance of babies and children. And I think that what happens, this comes back to what I said earlier in this conversation, that, um, what can happen is that this disposition and the relevant mental processes are, are sabotaged. And there's, there's a spanner is put into the works so that, um, we lose the ability to do those things and somehow. Yeah. It can happen. This can happen even later in life. And that's what I said earlier. I don't understand. I don't really understand how it happens later in life. I think I have some kind of understanding about how it could be sabotaged. ### David Deutsch 01:06:18 - 01:06:38 Um, when a person is young, but once they have learned and understood enough to live a life, even poorly, then how do you sabotage the very means by which they have got whatever they have already got? And I don't know how that's not. Yeah. ### Peter Boghossian 01:06:38 - 01:06:45 Do you think that not cultivating a disposition to correct errors is a moral problem? ### David Deutsch 01:06:46 - 01:07:55 Yes. If I understand you correctly, I think that, uh, the basic moral problem is what should I do next? Losing the ability to criticize some idea of what you should do next is morally wrong. I, I'm not sure I understood you correctly. No, you, you, you did. Yeah. Um, great. Maybe one, another, two more topics. Uh, here's one. Uh, Plato and Socrates. I know the Republic is one of your favorite books, uh, Peter and David, you've written a whole chapter on like Socrates and dialogue with Plato. And I want to kind of tie that in with the ethics of what Socrates was doing by going out on the street and being a gadfly. Maybe street epistemology is not as coercive. We don't really accost people with like, you know, give me your belief. I'm going to ask you questions about it. It's more consensual. We get a lot of informed consent, but the basic ethics of that project of going out ### Peter Boghossian 01:07:55 - 01:08:00 In public and helping people think about their ideas, what do you think about that? ### David Deutsch 01:08:00 - 01:11:53 Is that something even we should be doing in this day and age like Socrates did? Yeah. Well, I think Socrates, um, never, uh, forced people to listen to him. You know, they're always free to walk away. What was keeping them talking to him was that he was saying outrageous things and they wanted to contradict him. That that's good. I mean, that, that's that, you know, that, that's the way that's the moral way to attract people to, um, chat to you. Uh, and you know, that that's what does not happen in schools. Let's say schools do the opposite of that. They, they say that you have to listen, whether you're interested or not. And you have to end up with the, with the predetermined answer, whether you're interested or not, whether you agree or whatever. So, um, however, I think Socrates as portrayed in the Socratic dialogues is, I think, unnecessarily abrasive. I mean, people are engaging with him despite the fact that he's kind of, um, uh, I don't know what the right word is, but he's a gadfly and he's stinging them. Well, whereas I think it's better, it would have been better for him to say, um, okay, well, I've been thinking about this thing. How do we, how do we know that the sky isn't going to fall down? And, um, person might be interested by that. Um, whereas what he, and I suppose you, now that I come to think of it, wants to do is that you have in mind a certain error that you think people are making. And when somebody is, is obviously making that error, you want to challenge them, that is what Socrates did. But to answer your question, I don't see how that can possibly be wrong to do that. I mean, this is the fundamental activity of humans, um, is, is to, is to, uh, criticize and conjecture. So long as you're not in a position of authority or coercion, you're doing the right thing, the person can walk away. Awesome. Yeah. I'm usually out there in the public with my, uh, basically this setup with a sign and I'll let people come to me and we chat about whatever they bring up. Nobody's coerced. No, no coercion as far as I can tell. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you for that. And maybe the last topic I want to talk about pessimism versus optimism. Can I ask you, can I ask you one question? Sure. Something that that's been tormenting me for years. Richard and I did an event on this was my first question to him. I, um, the Fermi paradox, where is everybody? And is it possible that our model of the universe is completely incorrect? Yes. Well, it depends what you mean by completely. I mean, um, well that we're in a matrix or a brain in a vat or something. Oh, that, no, that, that, that is, um, the epitome of a bad explanation because, um, you just said, you know, the brain in the vat or the computer or the computer simulation or in the mind of a demon or whatever, those are all the same theory and that it's infinitely variable. ### David Deutsch 01:11:53 - 01:15:44 There's, there's no reason to choose one of them over the other. There's no, they're uncriticizable and then an uncriticizable theory is automatically to be rejected because it can't possibly fit into the scheme that corrects errors. So we could always be wrong. It could be that there's the, there's the pixies sitting at the bottom of my garden who are going to come into the house and kill me. The moment we, um, end this conversation, but I just made that up. I could make up a thousand stories. Uh, and it's not rational to make conjectures that aren't attempts to criticize a theory, which is part of a problem that you're interested in. Okay. So with the Fermi paradox, Carl Sagan said we could be the first that would explain it. We could be the last. There are other explanations like a great filter, et cetera. But is the, is this one of the few examples where the lack of evidence indicates that the models that we have are not accurate? No, I don't think it's such a great problem. Basically. Uh, I don't think you, I mean, it could be that our whole model of cosmology is wrong. Um, and in fact, you know, our whole model of cosmology was changed about 20 years ago when the accelerated expansion was discovered. So, uh, it, it doesn't actually affect the Fermi paradox, but that kind of thing could affect it because in fact, thank you for not taking offense at my, uh, no, the opposite of what I want to do is the, I think it's, uh, the problem is less problematic than it seems for much more prosaic reasons. Um, there are all sorts of ways in which the universe could be full of intelligent life and they haven't made contact with us just for a start. It could be that they are, and this is acknowledged by the, by the theorists of the Fermi paradox, it could be that they're, um, not interested because they have already made contact a million times with primitive civilizations and it's no longer interesting enough to be worth sending out probes across the universe and, you know, having a conversation at 10,000 years between sentences, you know, that's just boring. So that's just one simple reason. Another one is that they might be, um, expanding downwards. Like Feynman said that, um, there's plenty of room at the bottom by which he meant that in terms of orders of magnitude, there are more orders of magnitude between us and the smallest possible thing than there are between us and the largest possible thing. And so every time you expand, let's say to another star, you're going to increase the time it takes. Say you have a culture, um, that exists on two stellar systems, then if it takes say four years to the nearest star, if it takes four years there and four years back for the next new idea, then the benefit you get from the other civilization will always be delayed by at least eight years. And in fact, in practice, more than just a back and forth will be needed. ### David Deutsch 01:15:44 - 01:16:59 It's going to take more than just one cycle of back and forth, supposing it takes 10 cycles of back and forth to become uniform, uniformly approving of, uh, iPhones. So somebody says, you know, iPhones would be a good idea. And someone says, no, it's a terrible idea because you need clicks on your, you need haptic feedback on your clicks and so on. So somebody has the idea on one solar system for that idea to travel to the other solar system might take a century. And meanwhile, the ideas on each planet separately, um, proceeding on a timescale of, you know, years, not centuries. So the conclusion for that is that the aliens might not want to expand in the sense of going to distant places. They might want to expand in the sense of shrinking themselves down so that more and more and more of them can occupy a given volume. ### Peter Boghossian 01:17:00 - 01:17:46 So one comment and then Reid one more question. I promise that's it. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to shut up. So my question is that like, let's say that I buy that. Let's just say that I accept by fiat that the overwhelming majority of intelligent shall we say spacefaring life beings subscribe to that. Well, that given the Drake equation and the possibility of the universe could be teeming with life, we should expect to see some that don't subscribe to that. And so we should expect consequently to see something like a von Neumann probe or some, some evidence of that, but yet again, we see nothing. So that's just a comment. So am I my yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. ### David Deutsch 01:17:46 - 01:18:35 Uh, you don't have to accept anything. There's an argument. There's the Fermi argument that says that it's really weird that we don't see aliens and that if they were there, we'd see them. What I said to you is, is not the rival theory. It's a criticism of that argument. It's a criticism of the idea that that is terribly puzzling. And I only mentioned one way it might be okay. There are many other ways it might be okay. And I don't have to believe any of those. In fact, my guess is that the answer is one that nobody's thought of yet, but it doesn't have the aspect of an insoluble problem. Okay. ### Peter Boghossian 01:18:35 - 01:18:42 My, my, my last question is, do you think that the laws of physics are fixed? ### David Deutsch 01:18:42 - 01:22:24 Like if the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second squared, like, do you think at some level of technology, we would be able to change that? If we can change it, then that wasn't a law of physics, by the way, it is per second, not per second squared. Oh, sorry. So I see. There you go. I said, I proved myself. Yeah. Not a physicist. If the laws are changeable, that means that there is some deeper law according to which one can change the subsidiary law. So for example, Ohm's law was actually, that was never thought to be a law. Well, let's pretend that it was once thought to be a law. And then people discovered semiconductors and then they found that we can actually change, um, the behavior of materials so that they don't obey Ohm's law. And the next thing is you discover transistors and the next thing you discover computers and so on. But then that, that we would say with hindsight, then Ohm's law actually never was a law. It's just an approximation to a law. And similarly the speed of light. Uh, I mean, we know that the universe itself, space can be expanding at faster than the speed of light. In fact, distant space, you know, a few billion light years from us is receding from us faster than the speed of light. Um, even though nothing in space can exceed the speed of light. So our previous conception of what restriction the law of the constancy of the speed of light imposes on us is slightly wrong. So in short, if it can be changed, it isn't a law. And in fact, if it can be changed systematically, that means that there's another law according to which we can change it systematically. Gotcha. All right. Last, last topic, Peter, I think it's, I think it's safe to say you're fairly pessimistic about at least the near future in terms of the West or the United States, maybe partially Europe. Um, do you want to make a quick case as to why you're pessimistic in a concise way and then we'll get David's thoughts. Uh, massive deficits, uh, wide scale institutional organizational capture problems with not talking about problems, immigration. I mean, there were just so many, so many problems. I don't, I just don't even know where to begin, but suffice it to say that I'm pessimistic about the future of the West, um, attacks on liberalism, attacks on enlightenment values. People, and I don't think that these are merely fashions. I think that that there's something fundamental about the values of civilization, science, reason, uh, epistemic adequacy, if you will, or epistemology, I think that that truth has been sufficiently demeaned that I don't know how we're going to recover from this. We don't trust our institutions, but anyway, but if I, if I were to just pick one variable, it would be, I do not see how we're going to pay back our deficit. ### David Deutsch 01:22:26 - 01:26:40 I just don't think it's possible. Every economist I've, with whom I've spoken, not a single one has said, oh yes, this is not a six. It just in the last month, it went to 34 trillion. So that coupled with all of the other problems that we face is not making me a happy camper. Um, well, I disagree as you guessed, um, but let me say first that I don't think there's any law of nature or inevitability or prophecy that says that we must solve this, that we must, you know, it's impossible that the West will be destroyed. It's the, it's impossible that civilization will be destroyed. There, there are no, there are no laws that are going to be solved, there are no guarantees like that in my worldview. There are no guarantees. And what's more, um, it, it, if we are going to solve it, it will require creativity, it will require knowledge that we do not yet have to get over this. Um, some things will collapse. The second thing I want to say is that all the things you mentioned, I would cast them as problems and problems are soluble. So the thing that I would want to point to is that, um, we need to address the problems with creativity, with reason. Um, and address them one by one, address the ones that we think are the most pressing first. So, um, one other thing before I say, you know, what would happen if there was an economic collapse, our society, our civilization grew out of societies that were not enlightened. Things were really, really bad in the 16th century and in the 17th century. And things got better. We somehow pulled ourselves out of a hole that by any accounts is surely worse than the hole we're in now. And yet we were pulled out of it by rather crude people who most of the time, uh, sort of, uh, were suffering from diseases and whose interaction with each other mostly consisted of hacking each other with large choppers. And those were the kind of people that created the enlightenment in the first place. And their society changed into our society. I'm not going to insist on when it happened, but in all the candidates for when it happened, it happened very fast. So in the English case, you had in the 16, I forget now the date, 1640s or whatever it was, the English civil war, you had the whole country was being destroyed by a war between two factions, one of whom was fundamentalist religious people who were utterly intolerant and the other side was believers in absolute monarchy who were utterly intolerant and they were hacking away at each other. And, uh, and yet 40 years later, you had the bill of rights. Um, you know, you Americans think you had the bill of rights in, uh, in, uh, 17, whatever it was, but it's just a copy of the English one of 1689. Now we plagiarized it. Yeah. That's that's, you know, like, like in 40 years now, the reason that it could happen in 40 years is that the ideas were largely already there. And people, what it took was for people to realize something like, we can't go on like this, right? ### David Deutsch 01:26:41 - 01:30:18 Well, what are we going to do instead? Well, you know, then one party would say, well, let's have the king, you know, and the other party would say, no, let's have God. And then they say, yeah, yeah, we've been there, done that, didn't work. Um, how are we going to actually improve things? And that's the kind of thing that, and many of the answers that they came up with, or if not all the answers they came up with were wrong in themselves. They, they also had flaws and they, they, they caused all sorts of things to go wrong, but they were better than the previous, they had corrected the errors in the previous theories about how to do things. So coming back to the present day or the near future that you fear, if there's an economic collapse and the government defaults on sovereign debt, like Mr. Trump said he would do before he was elected. Fortunately he didn't, but let's suppose that it happens and there's this collapse. Not everything is going to collapse. The, um, roads will still be possible even if they increasingly have, um, potholes, the factories will still have their machine tools. The people will still have their knowledge. It's just that some people will find that what they thought was their nest egg for the future is now worthless. Worthless like happened to Germany and other countries, um, during the great inflation, um, so you can have a great inflation when all the value in the society is destroyed and then you can start digging yourself out of the hole. And what it takes to do that is to recognise that there's a problem, to theorise about what the problem is, guess what the, what needs to be corrected in order to make things work, work again. You know, in this case we'd be, we'd be hoping that, that the, you know, we, we're aiming for a situation where the economy is again, like it was in the 1950s, but the position of gays and blacks and so on is not like it was in the 1950s. So we'd know kind of what we're hoping for. We'd know that the existing institutions failed to achieve that. And so people would have ideas and the problem is soluble. So the idea that the problems are inevitable, but soluble is one way of stating what I call optimism. Excellent. Amazing. Well, this has been a very special treat for me. I appreciate having this conversation between one, two of my great intellectual heroes and this was awesome. Thank you so much. It's been fun. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. No, thank you. So where can people find you? How do, how do people, if they want to get in contact with you, do you have a substack Twitter or what? All my internet presence can be found on my website, which is just look up David Deutsch on Google and you'll see my website or on Twitter, I'm DavidDeutschOxf, short for Oxford, but they didn't have enough characters to put Oxford. ### David Deutsch 01:30:20 - 01:30:48 Amazing. All right. Thank you so much, David. Thank you. We genuinely appreciate it. Thank you. Fun conversation. Thank you for watching. Everything we do is under the umbrella of the National Progress Alliance, nationalprogressalliance.org. It's a nonprofit independent 501C3. 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