# 2025-09-12 - The Shape of Dialogue - What Is the Best Pathway to Knowledge? with David Deutsch [Official](https://shapeofdialogue.com/episode/how-do-we-know-what-we-know-with-david-deutsch-the-shape-of-dialogue-41) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r56Z76L_I8) [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-the-best-pathway-to-knowledge-with-david/id1530320341?i=1000726992351) Duration: 01:23:49 ## Transcript ### David Deutsch 00:00:00 - 00:00:37 There is only one way of creating knowledge. It's the way that scientists create knowledge, it's the way that artists create knowledge, it's the way that young children create knowledge, which includes knowledge of existing knowledge. All that is created by the same method understood by, best understood so far by Popper, conjecture and criticism, or problem conjecture criticism. ### Michael Goldwater 00:00:37 - 00:00:39 Welcome to The Shape of Dialogue, David. ### David Deutsch 00:00:39 - 00:00:40 Thanks for having me. ### Michael Goldwater 00:00:40 - 00:01:05 Yeah, well thanks for having me. I'm here in your beautiful garden in my first open-air podcast, which is very, very cool, on a very, very beautifully warm Oxford day. Unusual, yes. Is it unusual? Is it? My locks are very beautiful, the bit that I've seen so far. So thank you very much. Now, first question. Why do you have a positive vision for humanity? ### David Deutsch 00:01:05 - 00:02:19 Well, I think I'd rather use the word aspiration. So I think that human beings are what I call universal explainers, which means that they're capable of arriving at any conclusion, but that's true or false. And we arrive at true ones via a history of false ones. So I think there is nothing beyond human capacity to create, to understand, to control, with the only limitation being the laws of physics. But equally, there's no limit to the size of error we can make. And we depend for both things on error correction. So error correction is the most important attitude of the mind, and it's also the most important institution, the most important characteristic of institutions in society. Sort of the most important mechanism. Yes. ### Michael Goldwater 00:02:19 - 00:02:24 So just to drill down on that, why is error correction so important? ### David Deutsch 00:02:24 - 00:02:41 Because errors are inevitable. So I'm a fallibilist, like Karl Popper. So I believe that there's nothing infallible in the world. There's no touchstone of truth that we can find somewhere in the garden and pick up and ... ### Michael Goldwater 00:02:41 - 00:04:19 Say, you know, is this true or not? And it'd be infallible. Sorry, whenever you say that when I'm listening to you on your podcasts, I always think of the Pope. Yes. Surely you must say, except for the Pope. No. As I have often explained, even if the Pope is infallible, your theory that the Pope has said a particular thing is fallible. Your theory that that is the Pope, you heard saying it, is fallible. Even if you break into the Vatican and hide somewhere, and by the way, he has to be sitting in the throne for it to be infallible. I didn't know that. If he's not sitting in the throne, it doesn't count. He's fallible. So he's sitting in the throne, you're hiding in the room, you see him sitting in the throne, and he says a thing. You still can't be sure, you're not infallibly sure, because you don't know that this is the day on which he's going to be. Maybe he's doing a dress rehearsal. Or it could be a fake Pope. It could be a stand-in for the Pope. So these are all examples of the fact that in order to conclude that something is true on the grounds of papal infallibility, you have to assume fallibly a lot of other conditions, and you can't get past that. There's no way of getting past that completely. So we come to knowledge through fallibility, is that what you're saying? ### David Deutsch 00:04:19 - 00:04:21 Yes. Yeah. ### Michael Goldwater 00:04:21 - 00:04:33 Right. So Richard Feynman said, first we guess, then we test. Yes. Now, which leads me to the question, how do we know what we know, and how do we know whether what we know is worth knowing? ### David Deutsch 00:04:33 - 00:05:39 Yes. So by the way, test is only relevant in science. In fact, that's the definition of science, that it consists of testable theories. But philosophy is also a thing, and there's philosophical knowledge, and there's moral knowledge, and there's aesthetic knowledge, and we can improve all those things, and we can make errors in all those things. So what's important in each case is the institutions of consent and error correction and criticism by which existing theories can be tested. Even the true ones, suppose we have a true theory, we don't really know how true it is until we have criticized and tested it against either experiment or outside science against all sorts of other criteria, like whether it meets the problem, whether it contains hidden assumptions, whether it contains hidden contradictions, and so on. ### Michael Goldwater 00:05:39 - 00:05:53 You said the testing only applies to science. You mean science in the broader sense? We can test lots of things. Sports teams test things. But in what way are you defining science? ### David Deutsch 00:05:53 - 00:06:07 Yes, so a test is only relevant when we have general theories about the world, like laws of physics or theories of evolution. ### Michael Goldwater 00:06:07 - 00:06:23 But what if we don't know the law? When you have a test match and two sides are playing cricket against each other, that's a test in a certain sense of the word, but there is no theory that that's testing. ### David Deutsch 00:06:23 - 00:07:06 When the match is over and one side has won, the commentator, a knowledgeable commentator, may say, oh, they were very lucky to win, you know, just a millimeter the other way and they would have lost. The losing team was the better team on the day. We take this for granted in sports that the test is not conclusive. It's inherently not conclusive. Even in science, a test is not infallible either. We can make a mistake in a test or misinterpret it, or the lab assistant may have falsified the results in order not to be fired. ### Michael Goldwater 00:07:06 - 00:07:25 Yes, but we do, I'm sorry to drill down on this, but we do test things in many domains. Again, I think going back to sports, a sports team will test which is the fastest car and all that sort of thing in a scientific method. So it applies to that or not? ### David Deutsch 00:07:25 - 00:07:47 Yes, so if you have a general theory that this make of car is better than that make of car, you can test this. The test is fallible as in all scientific tests. You may have made a mistake, there may be a wind that you hadn't taken into account, but yes, you can make that test because it was a general theory. ### Michael Goldwater 00:07:47 - 00:08:03 Yes, so you talk about theory laden. Yes. Have I got this right? You have to start with a theory before you can do the test. Yes, in fact. Before you can do anything. You have to start with two theories at least. ### David Deutsch 00:08:03 - 00:10:11 Because if you have only one theory, you can always interpret any outcome of the test as confirming the theory. You just say, if I make a measurement of the height of the house with a laser instrument that measures the height of the house and then it turns out to be three miles, then I will conclude that the machine was not working properly. Yes. Without ever taking a screwdriver and opening the machine. Yes. And that is because there's no rival theory. So if there was a theory which prima facie said the house is no more than a certain height and another theory that says it was at least a higher height, then I can take this test with the machine to say which of the theories was right. Not infallible, but that's a good test. So if you lived in a world where houses could be infinitely high, when it said three miles, you'd be quite happy with that. Yes. But because you have this theory in a sense of how high houses are, you know that a three-mile house is probably pretty unlikely. And that's true in both cases. If you lived in a world where houses could be arbitrarily high, you would have a theory that that's so. And if you didn't have a theory that that's so, then you'd be back at square one. The instrument wouldn't tell you anything. So in a sense, theory is a bit like the water that fish swim in. They don't know they're there. We're not going around thinking I've got a theory for putting plastic in a rubbish bin. Yes. Or I've got a theory to catch the bus to come here. Though unlike fish, we can make explicit an inexplicit theory. When things become problematic, we can make our assumptions explicit. Again, not all of them. We can never reach all of them. But we can conjecture that maybe it's our assumption that so and so. Maybe it's our assumption that this transparent stuff around us is not air. It's water. As well. ### Michael Goldwater 00:10:11 - 00:10:38 We're not in water now. So, okay. What is knowledge? So, over the years, I've adopted several different definitions of knowledge. My current one is shaped by my latest work on the constructor theory, which is that knowledge, all of them have in common that knowledge is a form of information. But what kind of information is knowledge? ### David Deutsch 00:10:38 - 00:10:58 I slightly changed my mind on. And at present, I say that knowledge is information with causal properties, with causal content, causal power. The knowledge, if you apply the knowledge, something will be caused as a result of this. Yes. Right. ### Michael Goldwater 00:10:58 - 00:11:07 And sorry to drill down, but I'm a stickler for definitions. Yeah, cool. So, when you say knowledge is a form of information, what's information? ### David Deutsch 00:11:07 - 00:11:14 Oh, information is, so you first, this is straight out of constructor theory. So, you. ### Michael Goldwater 00:11:14 - 00:11:33 What is constructor theory? It's a new idea for how to frame laws of physics, how to express them, which I'm working on with Chiara Marletto and some other colleagues. I should say it's an idea for a theory. It's not yet a fully fledged theory. We're working on it. So, back to information. ### David Deutsch 00:11:33 - 00:12:36 Yeah. The constructor theory of information first defines information medium. An information medium is a physical system that has at least two states which have the property that, two properties, one is that they can be, that the states can be permuted. That is, you can, if there are more than two, you can perform any reversible computation on them physically. And that means like a switch can be on or off. And you can flip, you can flip the switch. Yeah. And the other property is that the state of it can be copied into another physical system, into another information medium. Right. Now, you asked what is information. A system is said to contain information if it's an information medium in one of its information states. ### Michael Goldwater 00:12:38 - 00:12:49 Okay. And just going back to knowledge. So just remind me what you said in relation to knowledge and information. Knowledge is a particular kind of information. ### David Deutsch 00:12:49 - 00:12:52 Yes. Most information is not knowledge. Right. ### Michael Goldwater 00:12:52 - 00:12:55 So you have a set and a subset is knowledge. ### David Deutsch 00:12:55 - 00:13:28 Yes. Right. So the set of information is not infinite but almost infinite. Yes. In that sense. Yes. And knowledge is a much, is a tiny part of it. Well, it's as large as the physical objects are in which you're storing it. So in practice, it's unlimited. Because once you get to a size of 10 to the 10 to the 10 possible states, then you're never going to reach the end of that in the age of the universe. ### Michael Goldwater 00:13:28 - 00:15:27 Right. Right. And it's the same for knowledge. Right. But only humans can have knowledge. No. So there I'm, if you think about the definition I gave, DNA contains knowledge. So I would have thought that was information. No, because a gene containing information, there are two kinds of genes. There are those that contain knowledge and those that don't. Oh, really? So the ones that don't are, you know, that sort of junk DNA or whatever. The DNA that constitutes genes has a physical effect. I see what you mean. It causes a cause. So if I have a gene for, I don't know, manufacturing insulin, then... Well, I've obviously got the gene for red hair. So... Indeed. Indeed. And that causes it by a chemical process which one can trace the causal chain back to that knowledge. Right. Right. So, yes, okay, that's very interesting. What's explanatory knowledge? So knowledge itself, there are two categories. There's explanatory and non-explanatory knowledge. The knowledge in genes is non-explanatory because it does not express its causal power in a code. So it doesn't say... When you're looking at a distant object, the reason you change the side, change the tension in the muscles around your eye lens is that this will bring the light from the distant object into focus. There's nothing in the gene that says that. It just says, when you're looking at... It doesn't even say that in words. It's not in English. I can't read... ### David Deutsch 00:15:27 - 00:15:36 Yes, it's not in English, but it's not in any language. It's just a pure instruction that does this without ever saying that it does this. ### Michael Goldwater 00:15:36 - 00:15:40 Sorry, would you say that is an algorithm? ### David Deutsch 00:15:40 - 00:16:47 There are algorithms, but that's a particularly simple algorithm. Sorry, sorry, carry on. So an explanation is almost always something that makes a statement about the known, the seen, the present, and so on, in terms of the unknown, the unseen, the past, the future, and so on. And it has a... It gives a reason in words or in symbols, mathematical symbols, whatever. And also there are explanations that are not in words, which I can come to if you like, which says why that is so, how that is brought about, how the past has affected the present, how the past should affect the present if you are right about the explanation. ### Michael Goldwater 00:16:47 - 00:17:06 And why is the term important? Why do you use the term? Explanatory knowledge is by far the most powerful in terms of causation. At the moment we can't really see that because... ### David Deutsch 00:17:06 - 00:17:41 Well we can in special cases like, for example, entities with explanatory knowledge are the only ones that can propel themselves to the moon and back to the earth without being destroyed. So that can only be done with explanatory knowledge. So therefore humans are the only ones to have explanatory knowledge. Although in the past there were several species that also could. Well, humanoid animals. Yes, particular animals. ### Michael Goldwater 00:17:41 - 00:18:26 So you're talking about Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, I think. Yes, Homo erectus is probably the first one. Yes, because they made fire and they cooked. They controlled fire. They controlled fire, yes. And in the sense that that is a tipping point in terms of... On earth it is, because we don't know a way of controlling fire without explanatory knowledge. On some other planet maybe fire is trivial to control. Right, but I mean I'm just thinking of a bush fire. I'm a Homo erectus guy. I grab a burning branch. Do I need an explanatory knowledge for that? ### David Deutsch 00:18:26 - 00:18:46 No. I just need an experimental mind or being able to put the A and B together. The thing is, what you really have to do is not just grab a branch, because any monkey could do that. Although they'd have to overcome their instinct. In a sense you need an imagination to... Exactly. ### Michael Goldwater 00:18:46 - 00:19:11 Again, it's just like things like capuchin monkeys. They have an imaginary sense. They can actually say, okay, inside that very, very hard to open nut is something edible. I don't think they can. Maybe not, but yes, you have to have an imagination to actually say, this can do this. When I say they controlled fire, I mean they could make a campfire. ### David Deutsch 00:19:11 - 00:19:54 That is... Ex nihilo. Yes, yes. So they had some fire and somebody thought, if we could keep that going all night, it will stave off the wild animals. That thought is typical of explanatory knowledge. You see that I stated it in terms of... in words. As I said, on another planet, there could be genes to do that, that evolve without an explanation. But on our planet, it's more or less obvious that that couldn't arise, because there are too many separate things you have to imagine before the fire can be useful. Yes, and the key word in that sentence is imagine. ### Michael Goldwater 00:19:54 - 00:20:01 Yes. And so you refuted my conjecture that capuchin monkeys had imagination. ### David Deutsch 00:20:01 - 00:20:05 Yes. So that... ### Michael Goldwater 00:20:05 - 00:20:14 Would you say that's the key distinction between animals and human animals? Well... Or one of them? ### David Deutsch 00:20:14 - 00:20:39 Yes. I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of things which are given different names in human language, like imagination and creativity and so on, which I think are all aspects of the same thing, and they all arrived together for the same evolutionary reason as each other, and that's why we have all of them together. The thing about monkeys... In my book, I quote... ### Michael Goldwater 00:20:39 - 00:20:40 Which book? ### David Deutsch 00:20:40 - 00:24:37 The Beginning of Infinity. Yes. I quote... I think he's Richard Byrne. I hope I'm not getting his name wrong. Who's both a theoretical and practical animal behaviour expert, and he spent a lot of time observing gorillas in the wild. And the species or the... I should say the culture of gorillas that he observed had this feature of being able to crack a certain kind of nut that no other species could open. And... Actually, I wonder if it's really no other species, because otherwise how could the nuts evolve? Maybe they co-evolved with the gorillas. Anyway, a different story, but... He observed how they open it. First of all, they take ages to learn. They don't just copy another gorilla. They take ages and lots of trial and error. From a small child? Presumably, yes. Yes, they watch their mothers. Yeah. And... And he could tell, this is the clever part of the experiment, that they didn't know why they were doing the various actions. So the actions involved grabbing the nut, doing a certain thing to it, slamming it down on the ground, whatever, something like that. And unfortunately, these gorillas are subject to a very common... accident, where they are crippled by having their thumbs... paralyzed. Squashed, yeah. By the rock. I don't know whether it's during this process. Maybe something separate. It's just in their environment. That's the thing that often happens. And the ones that have that happen to them continue to do the thing, which would require the thumb to be active if it was to work. And so they continue to do the thing, even though it doesn't work. Right. And that is... That and other things that he observed caused him to form a theory, which I think I agree with, of how the copying works. The copying consists of parsing, as he calls it, behavior parsing. Parsing the observed behavior into a sequence of automatic behaviors. They have automatic behaviors like pick up something, look at something, pick up something. And if they follow that sequence, then it leads to the nut being opened. They cannot learn a thing that isn't in the sequence. Sorry. They cannot learn a thing that isn't in the repertoire of individual behaviors that they can parse. So, and in the book, in my book, I say that for apes in general and for parrots in general, parrots can parrot. That is, they can mimic a sound, but they can't ape. They can't... If you do this to them, they don't do that with their wings. Vice versa, apes can mimic very well limb movements, but they can't mimic a sound. Even though there are several or many, I don't know, inborn sounds in their repertoire that they use. For example, I seem to remember that there's a specialized one for snake danger. So they can make that sound and the others can understand, or rather they can react to it. It's knowledge. ### David Deutsch 00:24:37 - 00:25:04 It causes things to happen. In a sense, it's a word or an alarm. Yes, but it's only we who can tell that the word has a meaning. It's just an automatic switch. It just presses a button in their brain and they're off. Yes. Because in a way, you don't want to waste time interpreting it. What does it really mean? Humans can do both. No, but yeah, from that point of view. ### Michael Goldwater 00:25:04 - 00:25:10 Can you talk about Karl Popper's concept of conjecture and refutation? ### David Deutsch 00:25:10 - 00:29:05 We're sort of going back to the beginning. Yes. So if you're a fallibilist, as I am and Popper is, then you regard all ideas as conjectures. If they weren't conjectures, they'd be held dogmatically, regardless of whether they're true or false. And that is obviously a path to disaster if you follow that. So every idea should be, in a rational mind, a conjecture. Which is essentially a guess. Yes, although the history of the conjecture is a history of problem solving. So it's not just any guess. Right, it's not a random guess. If you've studied physics, you're guessing the next thing from the body of knowledge you already know. Usually by varying it or by replacing small bits of it with something else. That you hope will meet the problem better. So you have a problem. It's in a framework of knowledge. Yes, that's right. Well, you can always go outside the framework, but you cannot go completely outside the framework because that's sort of meaningless. You don't know what anything means if you go outside the complete framework. My colleague, Matjaž Leonardis, made a very perceptive remark that he thought that Popper's conception of a problem is his greatest contribution to philosophy. And since he made many sort of groundbreaking contributions, I think I agree with that though. The concept of a problem is the thing that is the worst thing in previous epistemologies. And it is the thing that people tend not to get about Popper's. So what is it? Okay, how did he define a problem? Popper, again like me, or I like Popper, resists defining things because a definition can never capture the concept. But the idea of a problem in Popper is a problematic idea is one that calls for conjecture. It calls for change. It's not satisfactory. And I would like to add that a single theory can never be unsatisfactory. There's got to be another theory as well that tells you why that's unsatisfactory. So we sort of operate in a network of theories. Yes. Yes. And they're not consistent. So many epistemologies sort of regard the mind as an ideally consistent thing. You know, you've got integrity if your theories are all consistent with each other. And if you find out that one of them is inconsistent, you've got to hurry and change it to make it consistent. Now, I don't think it's like that at all. I think our minds are full of conflicting theories. Most of the conflicts are not visible to us at any time, but many of them are. And those are the reasons why we think. We think in order to solve problems. If we didn't have problems, we wouldn't think and we'd be dead. So you have to be happy with some dissonance. Yes. And your thinking. You should be. Otherwise, because if you're not happy with dissonance, that's a way of freezing your present state, including freezing all the unpleasant things in it and probably making way for things to get worse. ### David Deutsch 00:29:05 - 00:29:09 Yes. Well, you know, the old adage, the sign of intelligence is being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time. ### Michael Goldwater 00:29:09 - 00:29:13 Right. ### David Deutsch 00:29:13 - 00:29:20 Yeah. Sometimes that is taken to mean you should believe both of them. But the more Popperian idea is that you shouldn't believe anything. ### Michael Goldwater 00:29:22 - 00:29:26 Can you just restate the concept of a problem? ### David Deutsch 00:29:26 - 00:30:22 I've lost that. Let's say we can define it. I don't think I understood it. Right. It's the presence of two conflicting theories in one's mind. That's right. Yes. And which are causing something. They're causing you to notice them. If they just conflict logically and you never notice, that's not a problem in your mind. Right. So if it's sort of arcane philosophical conflict that nobody cares about. Yes. But if my TV's not working and I want to watch the cricket test, that's a major problem. Yes. Yeah. And so a problem essentially spurs us into action. Yes. Into thinking first. Well, that's action and including thinking first. Yes. And so problems motivate us to do the next thing, to make progress. ### Michael Goldwater 00:30:23 - 00:30:28 Why do you think there was so little progress until the Enlightenment? ### David Deutsch 00:30:32 - 00:31:03 I've heard you talk about it, but the one I always go to is apparently stone adze heads. Didn't change for 35,000 years in the Stone Age. Yes. Well, it's mind-blowingly staggering considering, you know. So that means that in most generations, nobody improved anything. Nothing happened, just status quo. And then you have to ask, if nobody was using this capacity for making progress, for solving problems, how did it possibly evolve? ### Michael Goldwater 00:31:05 - 00:31:09 Something that isn't used can't evolve. Can it happen by accident? ### David Deutsch 00:31:10 - 00:31:57 Can it happen by accident? I always wonder about this. No, because it's exponentially unlikely. So if a gene consists of, let's say, 100 base pairs, then the chances that that would arise by chance are 4 to the minus 100. Right. But accidents happen when I'm making something. And then I may have to use it immediately, and I notice that it works better. You know, on a very practical level. So you noticing that it works better is a creative act. I also have to have that theory of actually knowing what is better, too. Yes, you have to have a theory of what you expect it to do, ... ### Michael Goldwater 00:31:58 - 00:32:05 What you want it to do, and you find that it does more than you expect. And actually see that as positive, not negative. ### David Deutsch 00:32:05 - 00:35:03 Well, yeah, either way, you don't see why. You don't see why it did that. So because you don't see why, you may think of that. But for tens of thousands of years, people didn't. Why didn't they? I think the only possible answer is that the capacity to do this did not evolve for the purpose of making progress. That wasn't its evolutionary niche. That is not why it began and then was improved and improved and improved and improved over maybe a couple of hundred thousand years or more before we were thinking creatures. So what was it used for? I think the only, again, the only possible answer is that unlike the gorillas, it evolved for the purpose of understanding why the other ape is doing what they're doing. So instead of just saying what, which of the inborn behaviors is it doing, you have to have the imagination to say why is it doing that? Because it wants so and so. Well, yes, I've never thought about this, but the concept of why is fundamental to thinking, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. So that is asking to explain the seen in terms of the unseen. Explaining the seen in terms of the unseen. You haven't seen what the other ape wants. Right. You can't see into their brain. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. I mean, it is fascinating because essentially anatomically, am I correct, we are the same as two hundred thousand years ago. Very, very close, yes. As good as. Yeah. Even ten thousand years ago. Oh, oh, yes. Well, we're the same. We're the same at least thirty thousand years ago. Exactly. But in terms of our minds, I think it's arguable that we've been the same for over three hundred thousand years. In terms of the hardware of our minds. Yes. So I often think that the only difference between us and our ancestors, long, long, tens of thousands of years ago, is how we think. Yes, absolutely. And then not only that, but now we sit on, to quote, you know, Newton, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Yes. So we float on this sea or ocean of knowledge. Yes. And so we don't have to start from making an expense of thirty five thousand years working out how to make an adze head bed. Yes. I think probably even more important than that kind of knowledge, like making campfires and so on, is the knowledge of how to interact with each other. Yes. And not expect from other people in the same culture. Well, I've heard it said we've got big brains because we had to navigate the social world. That comes later. Yeah. ### Michael Goldwater 00:35:03 - 00:35:25 So what are you talking about then? So all these other theories about why our evolution was so fast, things like, you know, we had to navigate the social world. According to that theory, we'd have been navigating the social world better and better in every generation, but we weren't. ### David Deutsch 00:35:26 - 00:39:16 Right. So the only thing that was driving evolution was the ability to assimilate memes from other behaviors from other animals. And the meme space was full because memes, like if there was any meme space that wasn't full, it would be filled up at the next moment with somebody's behavior. You know, you'd copy the way they move their arms or, you know, you'd copy something else. And unfortunately, the memes that have, which in meme evolution have the greatest survival value, are the ones that keep themselves in existence. And they are enemies of memes which are useful. They are memes that are useful. Okay. I'm not sure if I understand that, but just to be clear for anyone who doesn't know what a meme is, it's a copyable piece of behavior or a copyable idea. But an idea- Wearing your baseball cap backwards is the one that Richard Dawkins always goes to. Yes. And we're mimetic animals. We copy each other. So if I have a child that's, if I'm Ugandan and I have a child that's brought up in London, he'll sound like a Londoner. Yes. So that- So go over that because I don't think I understood that, what you just said about memes. So a meme can be regarded either as an idea which can be transmitted from one person to another, or as a behavior which can be transmitted from one person to another. And this behavior includes speaking. So you can't draw a sharp line between an idea and a behavior. But unlike genes, considered as ideas, a meme must be enacted in every generation, otherwise it dies. Yes. Whereas genes can survive for many generations without dying. And they can be things which are used only in emergencies like how to repair a bow and- Right, right. I see what you mean. Yes. They can remain dormant. Yes. So where genes can remain dormant, memes, they live or die. There's only two- Genes can be passed on without being used. Yes. Memes can't. No. Yes, they're gone. Yes. Unless they're instantiated in artifacts. Yes. I mean, so, you know, it just instantly comes to mind. In the 70s, you know, medieval music came back. Yes. And there are lots of medieval- Quite right. You know, groups. Yes. And it hadn't been played for hundreds and hundreds of years. Yes. So that's an example of a meme. It is indeed. And it's also- If it's coded in an artifact. It's also an example of how definitions can never be perfect. So you see, you and I knew what a meme is. Yes. But stating it in words, you'll always find exceptions. It won't cover the ideas perfectly. And so that's a good example of that. I always say language is a poor medium for communication. Yes. Yes. So, okay. So, yes, okay, I get that. But we were talking about memes and they live or die. And, sorry, I've lost. This was, I think, in the context of why did it take so long? That's right, yes. Because the evolution did not favour memes for how to make a better campfire. ### David Deutsch 00:39:16 - 00:40:32 Yes, I see what you mean. They favoured memes for how to make sure- Yes, I see what you mean. The next generation behaves as you did. Yes, so it was a conservative meme structure. Very much so. Not an innovative meme structure. Yes, exactly. Right. But then, again, I always find these tipping points fascinating. Like the first piece of art, I think, which is from memory, maybe 70,000 years ago. It's just some crosses. Yeah, Blombos, yes. Yeah, it's just some crosses from South Africa. That's a tipping point because someone's had- That's an imaginative creative process. Yes. The first fire is an imaginative process. The first campfire. The first campfire, sorry, yes, that's what I meant. But then, we go on incredibly slowly, then there's the dawn of agriculture, which is another tipping point. Yes. But then it takes another roughly 10,000 years to get to the Enlightenment. Yes. Just explain what the- So why do you think- Well, is it like an exponential curve? No. In terms of like we have to get to this low point. Yes. It's still really low, but it's still far away from the beginning. It's more like- ### Michael Goldwater 00:40:36 - 00:40:59 Yes, but if you- what's it called? The logarithmic, which irons out all the ups and downs. What I'm saying is you get to the Enlightenment and you've had 70,000 years to get there, but then once you've got that key pivot point in knowledge, so much more can follow. ### David Deutsch 00:40:59 - 00:44:46 Yes. So once we got to the Enlightenment- Just explain what the Enlightenment is. So many people don't know what it is, but sorry. This is the Enlightenment, depending on where you count it, you might count it from the scientific revolution in something like the 16th century or the political aspects of it in the late 17th century and somewhere around there. The idea that- well, many ideas came together, but all of them were rebellions against authority. So we were talking about primitive humans. One way of saying that this faithfulness from one generation to the next is to say that there were authorities, that knowledge was based on authority. And it was right until the Enlightenment, except there were many Enlightenments from time to time which got squished. The only one that's lasted so far, and has lasted so far so far, has been our Enlightenment beginning in Britain and the Netherlands in the 17th century. Which was a rebellion that included many things from politics, from science, and so on, which somehow made it stable. We don't know why it acquired this stability. But it did. And I don't think that what led up to that can be described as a smooth process. Civilizations were destroyed. Most civilizations that have ever existed have been destroyed. And even the ones that lasted a long time, or maybe especially those, it's just that they're more visible because they lasted a long time. But they were destroyed too, because sooner or later they would come up against a problem that they couldn't solve. So they could be brought down by a simple thing like the weather changing, or the climate changing, and they had a certain pattern of doing things to the fields and irrigating the fields in a certain way, and it was no longer good enough. So the economy collapsed and the society collapsed, and in most cases we never heard of them again. We don't even know their names. I mean the Aztecs are a great example of that. They just literally disappeared. But also the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and so on, we know about some of them, but we don't know about others. So we had that inflection point of the enlightenment, and that has led us here where I can fly on a plane, catch a bus, record wirelessly, all that sort of thing. And that in the end, if we sort of complete the circle, has ended up with understanding how we got there in terms of Popper's epistemology. We understand some things about how we got there, yes. What's interesting is that the scientists who were doing, like Newton and et al., although they could do the science and it was very successful, they actually didn't have a full understanding of what they were actually doing. Yes, they had very poor epistemology and very poor philosophy of science. Fortunately, they ignored it. So what Newton said, wrote, that he did experiments and induced his theories from them. Of course he didn't know such a thing. ### David Deutsch 00:44:46 - 00:48:35 It's impossible. However, because he didn't take it seriously, he was able to make progress. In the 19th century, they began to take seriously this idea of empiricism, that you're supposed to induce the general theory from your observations. So that's if I look at this computer long enough, I'll know how it works. I can work out how it works inside. I'll work out there's a silicon chip in there. And that caused all sorts of retardation in both senses of the word. And we're not out of that yet. There are still very influential branches of empiricism and its successors, such as positivism, logical positivism, postmodernism, woke. All those things are the, you could think of them as rebellions against the enlightenment. So I was going to use the word counter-enlightenment. Yeah, they are. But they're also just mistakes in their own right. So it just so happens that the mistakes contradict the enlightenment. But so they're mistakes as well. And they rise and fall. And we've got no contract with reality that will, there's nobody that we could sue if they won. They could win. And as I said a while ago, there's no limit to the size of mistake we can make. And our civilization could go the way of every other civilization. I don't agree with the often heard trope that, oh, all civilizations in human history have fallen, so why not ours? The reason why that's a mistake is because ours is unlike all the others. Fundamentally unlike them. It had exactly that same thought. It's unlike them in just about every possible way. And that is, maybe that's, again, just it's a trope of this podcast, but maybe that is because we understand the concept of fallibilism, because we understand that we can make errors. And through that understanding, we develop mechanisms, both whether it's in science or social mechanism in politics, to smooth out those errors. Correct errors. And to make the least errors and find the best solutions in the shortest space of time. But having said that, no other civilization has created the destructive power that we have created. So it's sort of a double edged sword. We, because we've achieved so much, that gives us a possible portal into the future, but also could be a closed door as well. I don't think it can be a closed door in the sense of destroying ourselves physically. Right. The civilizations being destroyed by violence was common in, for most of human history. You know, you won't find the Carthaginians anymore. They were destroyed by force. So our civilization could be destroyed, but you will find descendants of the Carthaginians. And we will have descendants even if our culture is destroyed. Exactly. But we may go back to the Stone Ages. Yes. I mean, that's... I'm using hyperbole. Yeah. I mean, we might. We can, you know, we might destroy ourselves physically, but I don't think that's really the danger that's facing us. ### David Deutsch 00:48:35 - 00:52:12 The danger that's facing us is that we will choke off progress by adopting, by allowing ideologies that are anti-rational to penetrate positions of power. And we won't... the error correcting mechanisms may not be strong enough to resist them. Right. Well, that leads me to the listener letter called In Defense of Science that seven esteemed New Zealand professors wrote about five years ago. I call them the heretical seven. I hope so. Because they spoke the unsayable blasphemy of, quote, indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science. Ah, so I was wrong. I thought you were talking about the other faction. No, no, no. I'm saying they're heretical because they spoke something blasphemous. They said that indigenous knowledge, which is... so the indigenous people, the people who first arrived in the shores of New Zealand a few hundred years before the Europeans did, about 500 years or so, roughly, the Māori, their knowledge system is called Mātauranga Māori. And it's a combination of practical things like how to weave a basket, what flowers are edible at certain times of year, when's the best time to fish, all that sort of thing, and spiritual and mythological concepts. So they've got a series of, like all people, they've got a series of myths and then spiritual ideas like, you know, there's a certain place at the top of the North Island. So when you die, your spirit leaves from that point and goes off. The Labour government, the left leaning government led by Jacinda Ardern, who's quite renowned, when they were in power a few years ago, they tried to instantiate in the science curriculum, in the school curriculum generally, but particularly in science, that Mātauranga Māori was equivalent to so-called, in inverted commas, Western knowledge. And they actually put in the curriculum, something in the chemistry and biology curriculum, something called mauri, which is M-A-U-R-I, which is sort of a spiritual life force. So it's vitalism, essentially. So basically, all living things have this spiritual life force. You know, it's just a sort of mythological idea. They actually put that in the science curriculum and trialled it. Were these seven professors correct in bringing these changes to attention? And is it wrong that they were shunned so much? I mean, one of the professors was actually, stood down from his teaching, his teaching his first year biology because it was deemed unsafe for him to teach. ### Michael Goldwater 00:52:12 - 00:54:41 So I think this is an example of what we were just talking about, is an example of an anti-rational meme or anti-rational memeplex gaining power, gaining political power, and in particular the power to shun people, to get people shunned, to get people hurt, to get people's livelihoods removed, if they do not also enact the anti-rational memeplex. This has been happening all over the West and it is a poison for the West because it's not only trying to entrench falsehoods, which I think actually, you know, nobody's actually going to believe this stuff, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that they are forced to enact it, to mouth it, to say the politically correct things, or sorry, politically correct is the old-fashioned term for woke, the woke thing or whatever it's called now. By the way, the fact that it keeps changing its name is part of the way it works. Can you elaborate on that? So, you know, this could be called mysticism. It could be called blind empiricism because it denigrates explanation in favour of rules of thumb that allegedly work, whether they work or not, but if you abandon or denigrate explanation, then you're left with rules of thumb and no way of improving them. And the same is true of ideas of knowledge itself, which your example shows that the methods of criticism and error correction are being systematically, in that case, forbidden. And this is enforced by hurting people. And that is the thing which happened right from two million years ago or whenever Homo erectus evolved the capacity to do what we're doing and invent airplanes and so on. ### David Deutsch 00:54:41 - 00:58:55 They had the capacity to do that, but they never did it because their response to any beginning along any one that began the idea which would have led to that, which could have led to that, was to hurt them. Yes, fear of sticking your head above the parapet. Yes. Yes. So, I mean, these professors, to be fair, these professors weren't prevented from doing what they did. There was friction in getting the publication out. They had tried to write a longer piece in a, I think in a scientific journal, but it didn't pass, so they put it in the listener. But there, I mean, apart from there were two professors who one felt he had to resign because of the pushback and one who was Kendall Clements who was removed from his teaching first years because he was unsafe, obviously. But what I'm saying is the argument against what you're saying is what I've heard from many people is that they were free to speak their mind. They spoke their mind, but they got pushback. They got a lot of criticism. But isn't that just part of the normal discourse? No, it's not. You can tell that there's a torrent of criticism happening to all scientists all the time when they're working. This criticism was different. This is the kind that got you to lose your job. This is the kind that got people to spit at you in the street. This is the kind that got, made your children be the butt of unpleasant things in their schools and so on. In The Beginning of Infinity, I say that the suppression of progress is only a small proportion of that suppression that happens by punishing people for deviating. Most of it is aimed at the idea not being conjectured in the first place because nobody wants to be that guy. Yes. The real aim is not the seven professors. It's everyone else. There's this great line from a 17th century judge. He was sentencing a horse thief. He said, we are not hanging you to stop you from continuing to steal horses. We're hanging you to stop others from stealing horses. There's a punitive intention. It may not even be conscious. That doesn't matter. The meme just propagates. It doesn't matter whether anyone understands it or doesn't understand it. It's enough that they understand what the behavior is, including what you're supposed to say and not supposed to say. Then it propagates because you're doing it to the next generation. The irony of all this is that what they said was entirely true. You can't instantiate mythological concepts into, or it's wrong to instantiate mythological concepts and teach it to children as science. It's beyond ridiculous. It's not a coincidence that the ideas enforced in this way turn out to be wrong, turn out to be false. Even if they're true, even when they're true, it's still fatal to progress. Suppose you had a true theory. My example is Newton's laws. ### David Deutsch 00:58:56 - 01:03:33 Newton's laws are taught in schools as if they were holy writ. You're learning the behavior of applying them to a given set of problems. An object moves two meters per second to the right and so on. You learn the behavior of being able to answer those problems. If you're asked a question that is not in the range of behaviors, you don't know how to answer it because you have never encountered criticism of that. If you say, well, what is it that enforces momentum but not the momentum squared? No one encounters that question in their physics course. No one knows the answer. If a bit of progress depended on having thought of that problem and realizing what the answer is, then there'd be a path to progress was open. But if they can't, then there isn't. Of course, individual people can shrug off such things, and that's why there has been progress. Society as a whole has become rather rational in the scientific domain, in the economy, and in politics, politics generally. None of those are perfect. Quite the contrary, they're very, very imperfect. They're more rational than they used to be. Yes, they're rational enough for progress to be possible and for it to have happened. But other areas of life, interpersonal relationships and the worst one is education, still retain the anti-rational authority-based attitude to knowledge. So freedom of expression and freedom of speech are essential to not only knowledge, but to progress and to our long-term well-being. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I'm going to have to think of another question now. You've said it all. Yes, you've said it all. So is there more than one way of knowing, and do Indigenous people have a special way of knowing that is equivalent or superior to how science, reason and logic investigate the world and the universe? I think a better question. So the answer is no. There's only one way of knowing, which is to store stuff in our memory. But I'm saying one way of knowing is generally how we get to that knowledge. So is there more than one way of creating knowledge? And my answer is absolutely not. There is only one way of creating knowledge. It's the way that scientists create knowledge, it's the way that artists create knowledge, it's the way that young children create knowledge, which includes knowledge of existing knowledge. All that is created by the same method best understood so far by Popper, conjecture and criticism, or problem conjecture criticism. Let's move on to education then. Why should we take children seriously? Which is just so people don't know, that's a quote from you. Yes. We should take children seriously. Yes. So there is only one way of creating knowledge and it's the way that our ancestors used to work out what the other ape wanted and it's the way that was used by Einstein to solve the problem of how to unify gravity with special relativity. So it's all the same and it's used, even when we are learning something from a book or in a classroom, if we're really learning it in the sense that we're learning it with the ability to improve upon it, we are learning it, well actually, sorry, we're always learning it by conjecture and criticism, whether or not we're also learning the ability to improve it. ### David Deutsch 01:03:33 - 01:06:54 Because if you sit a chimpanzee down in front of a physics lesson and try to teach it Newton's theory of gravity, it won't learn it. Whereas if you teach it a complicated sequence of movements, it will learn it, in some ways more accurately than a human. And the same with the parrot, parroting things. Chimps are actually better at memorizing games than humans. Right, right. So we have learned to not do what they do in order to give us the ability to do what we can do and they can't. So all progress, so we've been talking a lot about memes and about culture and so on. So education is central to this because so long as humans have a finite lifetime and so long as memes have to be enacted or put in books where the behaviour of reading them is enacted or computers, then people are going to die and their knowledge is going to be lost unless it is passed on. So this passing on of knowledge has to preserve not just the knowledge, that is the least of it. As Popper says, even if that was destroyed, we could recreate it in a generation. But it's the inexplicit knowledge of the institutions of criticism, the institutions of consent which are built into our culture. Learning how to learn essentially or knowing how to learn. Yes, all children know how to learn, but what they don't know is what to expect of other people and how to not take the powerful person as an authority. In fact, they learn the opposite. They are trained as they have been for generation upon generation to learn how to enact the opposite idea that the powerful person is the authority by definition. If that idea again takes hold, then the stasis of our history, of most of our history, will take hold as well. And this is what we're trying to preserve when we try to preserve the ideas of enlightenment. So education is in a sense central to this, but how is that compatible with me saying that education has been one of the last things to experience the revolution of the enlightenment. It has become better. So in my lifetime, children are no longer being beaten in schools. Children are treated far better now than they were even within living memory, but it's nowhere near the same level. It's still teetering on the brink of collapsing into anti-rational memes, even though it's becoming less brutal, less boring, and so on. But the basic ### Michael Goldwater 01:06:54 - 01:07:15 Idea of being standardized and obedient remains. So what's your conception for education? If I was your son and I was five, what would you do? Well, I think freedom is one thing to go for, but I think ### David Deutsch 01:07:15 - 01:07:34 Conception of education should not be a single conception for everyone. In fact, it should be a different conception for everyone. No two people should have the same education. It's not a McDonald's. It's a customized restaurant. Yes, and it's not a school with standards. So standards means ### Michael Goldwater 01:07:34 - 01:08:09 Standardization. See, I mean, I have listened to you a lot on this, and I both agree and disagree with you. I spent 40 years teaching musical instruments in a private practice, so not a thousand kids, just one-on-one. And I've had a long interest in education for that reason. And on Monday, I went and did a podcast with Katharine Birbalsingh from the Michaela Community School. So you know who she is? I know who she is. Yes. Very admirable, although I wouldn't go ### David Deutsch 01:08:09 - 01:08:15 Within a million miles of that. But it is almost certainly a very good thing. ### Michael Goldwater 01:08:20 - 01:08:28 I taught music. I'm a musician. I'm also a creative. When you learn music, you have to have technique. ### David Deutsch 01:08:30 - 01:08:44 You can spend all the time having all the free time in the world playing exactly what you want. But if you go down the wrong road, you won't get there. It's no surprise that even the greatest ### Michael Goldwater 01:08:44 - 01:09:09 Musicians of all time have had teachers. So you need some structure and order to learn that technique. No. Well let me lay out my claim. And so I come from that point of view, from a musician's point of view of learning. I know technique is a visceral thing. You feel it. It's not an academic ### David Deutsch 01:09:09 - 01:09:29 Thing. And then seeing her school, it's actually astoundingly amazing that you're taken around by two kids. They're just like 13. And their confidence, so confident, so articulate. ### Michael Goldwater 01:09:30 - 01:10:06 They love the school. They understand that it's strict in terms of it has expectations. I don't like the word strict. It has expectations that they should be met. And I don't see how you can teach in a school without having some sort of sense of order and some sense of expectations. I'm not confident that kids, maybe I'm wrong in this, if you just let them do what they want, will actually make the same progress. ### David Deutsch 01:10:06 - 01:11:35 Just let them do what they want is not what I advocate. Yes. Okay. There's this game which I think is American called The Floor is Lava, which American children play. You've heard of it? I've heard of it. I don't know what it is. So say you've got a room with furniture and windowsills and just a room with complex internal geometry. Children often spontaneously invent this game, but it's also given a name because it's so common. The idea is you go once around the room without ever touching the floor because the floor is molten lava. And so you have to find ways of extending your leg and extending your arm. Now suppose that a child doesn't know of this game and asks you, says to you, I'm bored with this thing I'm doing. I'd like to try something new. You say to them, well, have you heard of this game, The Floor is Lava? And you tell the child what the rules are. The child starts playing it and enjoys themselves for a half an hour or whatever it is for an hour. Now what have you done? You've reduced the child's range of possible activities. ### Michael Goldwater 01:11:37 - 01:11:40 Previously, if you'd said to him, well, do whatever you like, of course, they'd be bored. ### David Deutsch 01:11:41 - 01:13:44 Yeah. So that includes walking across the lava and whatever. So this idea of not touching the floor is a fruitful idea. It can serve as the spur and also the criticism of ideas. Like, can you really cross that gap without first going over there and so on? So that's why I don't advocate saying, do whatever you like. But it's also not within my conception of a rational education to say, now you will try going around the room without touching the floor or something bad will happen to you. Not a punishment. We're not going to call it a punishment, but we'll be very, very sad because you haven't met our expectation. Well, you'll get the demerit. At Michaela they get demerit points. For example. Yeah. Now that- Or detention. Yes. So whether that is, which of those two is worse depends on circumstances, depends on luck. And sometimes neither of them is worse because the child may just shrug it off. But those two things are spanner in the works of creativity. And one, in my view, must not do either. So what one should be doing is creatively thinking of things that might be useful that the child, and by the way, the same holds for the adults, the same holds in the economy. We take it for granted that we don't force people to buy the output of a factory. This is what's needed in education that might dare to call itself rational and enlightened. ### Michael Goldwater 01:13:45 - 01:14:04 You know, the thing is, while you're saying that, you know, I'm thinking I both agree with you and disagree in the sense that can we do that on a mass scale? Like we can do it if you home school your kids. Yeah. Or there's one on one or something, you know. I don't know. Like the first ... ### David Deutsch 01:14:04 - 01:15:37 Person to invent a factory as we know it was only just over a century ago, was Henry Ford. Now, you know, when he had the idea of setting up his factory, did anyone go up to him and say, yeah, but you can't do this because how would you do this for the whole economy? How are you going to do this for blacksmiths? How are you going to and so on? And he was that I don't know or care. What I do know is that doing it now in this context is good. It will benefit mankind. It will, starting with the workers and the customers. But eventually it will spread to, I don't know if he would have said this, by the way, he was quite a bastard. But, you know, somebody better than Henry Ford with the same idea of factories might have said, I can't take that into account now. I can just tell you what's good and what's bad. And it's the same with education. I mean, I can see what's bad. I can see how to fix that in many cases. I can't see how to fix it in other cases like that school you visited. But I know that it can be. Maybe one way of thinking about it is the current education system, which seems to be full of very progressive ideas, progressive in inverted commas, capital P. Actually regressive. Regressive, which yes, I was going to say that which turned out to be decidedly regressive. ### Michael Goldwater 01:15:37 - 01:16:15 Maybe Michaela is a better solution than very sort of ineffective teaching where knowledge is actually not being passed down. And then maybe the stage after that, I asked Katharine, at the end, I said, what about creativity? You know, you've got this sort of essentially very regimented system, but highly effective, very ordered. Regiment is not the right word. Very ordered, right? In a positive sense. And I said, how does creativity fit into that? And she said something that really aligned with me was you have to have technique to have creativity. ### David Deutsch 01:16:15 - 01:17:25 Yes, well. And you get technique by applying yourself. But not necessarily by being forced to apply yourself. Yes. So did you see the video which came out recently, Magnus Carlsen being interviewed about how he learned to play chess? So he was interested in chess as a child. His father was a chess player. He got interested enough that they got him chess lessons once a week, and he really enjoyed that. And he would go to the chess lesson and do all the things. And then, as he explained, the teacher started giving him homework. And he went home. And now this is probably what saved the world champion. He decided he's not going to do this homework. And he went back the following week and he said to the teacher, teach me stuff, but don't give me homework. And so instead of homework, he bought chess books and he read the chess books. And what he derived from those chess books was something that had never been derived before by anyone. It was inherently creative. ### Michael Goldwater 01:17:25 - 01:18:51 But the pushback to that comment is we're not all Magnus. Yes we are. Magnus Carlsen. We're not, you know, I mean, I have taught literal geniuses and you don't have to teach them. But the mass of people aren't that fluent in actually gaining knowledge and taking creative leaps. You're not drawing that experience from a population who is doing whatever they like. Yes, yes. Well, I'm going to say something which is more aligned with what you, with your thinking. In my experience, schools teach people that it's wrong to be wrong. Oh yes. And I spent my lifetime telling my students there's nothing wrong with being wrong. All that's telling you is that's not the place to go. You need to go down this direction. And there's a, whether school teaches it or whether you're teaching it, it is inherent in us that we don't like being wrong. There's not a comfortable feeling. We feel self-conscious. But being in creative fields, as I'm sure you know, you have to make mistakes to be creative because you have to iterate and you have to say that's good, that's bad. And then you do another iteration. Yes, so my fourth question is, what is the most important thing that you do to be creative? ### David Deutsch 01:18:52 - 01:19:09 And then you do another iteration. Yes, yes. So my former boss, John Wheeler, one of his many aphorisms was, our whole problem is to make the mistakes as fast as possible. By the way, you might like to speak to Brett Hall. ### Michael Goldwater 01:19:10 - 01:19:11 I'm planning to. ### David Deutsch 01:19:11 - 01:19:15 Right, okay, good. Because he's a former teacher, former physics teacher. ### Michael Goldwater 01:19:15 - 01:19:41 Right, yes. And he understands what I would call the enlightenment view of teaching. Yes, yes. Well, I think it would actually be quite interesting getting you and Katharine into a discussion. I'm not sure we disagree on much. On fundamental theory, yes. But, you know, how important is that if someone is doing good in the world? ### David Deutsch 01:19:41 - 01:19:49 Yeah, I mean, where I fully agree with you is I think the education system is very uncreative. ### Michael Goldwater 01:19:50 - 01:20:09 And that's partly, it doesn't, the imperatives or the incentives for the teachers to be creative aren't necessarily strong as they should be. And it is a mass market, it's a McDonald's style of education. ### David Deutsch 01:20:09 - 01:21:40 Yes, yes. It just occurs to me that another example, apart from Magnus Carlsen, is Mozart, who's usually cited as an example in the other direction, because he was, you know, absolutely hot housed into becoming an expert, into acquiring the technique. But Mozart, unlike Mendelssohn, Mozart acquired superb technique long before he composed anything worthwhile. So he was like into his 20s before he composed anything that was world class. Whereas Mendelssohn, whose name was Felix, which means happy. So maybe that tells us something about, I don't know how his parents behaved, but he was composing world class things in his teens, in 15 or 16 years old. His Octet, he wrote I think in 16 or 18, which is astounding work. Yeah, the Octet is when he was 16. But I think he already, you know, he was obviously much better than Mozart when he was 16. But again, I think, I'm not sure if it's a good thing to take geniuses and use them as an example. Everyone has the same capability of being creative. It's a matter of what they're interested in and what obstacles they encounter. ### Michael Goldwater 01:21:40 - 01:22:02 Yeah, I'd agree with you on that. Well, I think we should probably stop there because the sun's shining, beaming down on us. Yeah, I may be getting a bit too hot. Yeah, and I just want to say thank you so much. It's been absolutely fantastic. ### David Deutsch 01:22:02 - 01:22:17 It's been fun. Yeah, it was a real honor to come out here and talk to you. So very much appreciate it. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Oh, by the way, what is the grammar of the title of your podcast? ### Michael Goldwater 01:22:17 - 01:22:21 The Shape of Dialogue. Yes. How do you mean what's the grammar? ### David Deutsch 01:22:21 - 01:22:25 Well, it doesn't make sense. Yes. Because dialogue doesn't have a shape. Exactly. ### Michael Goldwater 01:22:25 - 01:22:49 Well, I wanted it sounds good, it flows, it's poetic, it rolls off the tongue well. Every time I say, you know, people say, what's the name of your podcast? And I say the Shape of Dialogue and they say, oh, what a great name. I wanted the word dialogue in it. I'm a big fan of the Greeks. I actually wanted it to be the geometry of dialogue, but it doesn't flow. ### David Deutsch 01:22:49 - 01:22:52 Ah, okay. Poetic. I would have understood that. ### Michael Goldwater 01:22:52 - 01:23:14 Yes. So it's not as poetic. Also, it would have been quite good because then it would have been the God podcast, the T.O.D. So the shape, I think there is a sort of a shape in the sort of metaphorical sense. You know, we've had the shape of the style of being very positive, but you can have a very negative. ### David Deutsch 01:23:14 - 01:23:41 I get it now. Yes. The sort of thing I don't like is like, if you name a film, a river runs through it. I want to know through what before I can decide whether to watch this film. So ... ### Michael Goldwater 01:23:42 - 01:23:49 To help the Shape of Dialogue grow, please subscribe, like, and comment and share it to all and sundry. Many thanks.