All episodes of Naval

Naval

Episodes

It’s Mind Blowing That Our Minds Can’t Be Blown

Humans can understand every idea given enough time and effort

Published 10/30/21

More Compute Power Doesn’t Produce AGI

Even the most powerful computers can’t answer ‘why?’

Published 10/27/21

We Are Qualitatively Different From Other Species

There is no continuum between humans and chimpanzees

Published 10/25/21

Humans Are Exceptional

Humans aren’t just a form of bacteria that overran the planet

Published 10/22/21

Genetic Evolution Was a Prelude to Memetic Evolution

Ideas undergo the same evolutionary process as genes

Published 10/20/21

There Can Be No Final Theory of Gravity

All we have is better and better approximations to reality

Published 10/18/21

No Truth Can Be Justified

‘Knowledge’ is just our best guess at the time

Published 10/15/21

With a Good Theory of Knowledge, You Can Decide What Else Is True

David Deutsch’s theory is centered around good explanations

Published 10/08/21

The Beginning of Infinity

A collection of all our episodes on The Beginning of Infinity

Published 07/02/21

Rational Optimism Is the Way Out

Pessimism is self-fulfilling

Published 05/24/21

Pessimism Appears to Be the Intellectually Serious Position

But it ignores all the ways we’ve innovated our way out of previous traps

Published 05/17/21

It’s Easy to Extrapolate How Things Will Get Worse

It’s harder to guess how life might improve

Published 05/14/21

We’re All Equal in Our Infinite Ignorance

The door is always open for new ideas

Published 05/12/21

It’s Rare to Have Competing, Viable, Scientific Theories

General relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics is a recent example

Published 05/11/21

Science Advances One Funeral at a Time

Even the best get left behind

Published 05/07/21

Make Bold Guesses and Weed Out Failures

The best theories come from your imagination, not extrapolation

Published 05/05/21

Science Is About Explanations, Not Predictions

The prediction comes after the explanation

Published 05/03/21

Science Does Not Aim to Predict the Future From the Past

It is an error-correcting mechanism

Published 04/30/21

Science Broadens Our Vision of Reality

The multiverse is another step in this expansion

Published 04/28/21

We Explain the Seen in Terms of the Unseen

No one has ever seen the core of the sun

Published 04/26/21

The Multiverse

Experiments force us to acknowledge other universes

Published 04/21/21

Is Light a Particle or a Wave?

God does not play dice with the universe

Published 04/19/21

Probability Is Subjective

All physically possible things occur

Published 04/16/21

We Can’t Prove Most Theorems with Known Physics

Unprovable theorems vastly outnumber the provable ones

Published 04/14/21

Every Mathematical Theory Is Held Inside a Physical Substrate

You’re always bound by the laws of physics

Published 04/12/21