Here we move three arguments from social media to the podcast. 1. Given Deutsch’s universal explainer hypothesis, does it make sense to say that men commit more crimes due to testosterone? Are humans only 'approximately' Universal Explainers? 2. Can anything in reality be simulated? What exactly does it mean to be simulated? 3. Is “heat death” a bummer? What would Conan the Cimmerian say? --- Send in a voice message:...

Here we use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” as a springboard to discuss majority rule, moral progress, knowledge growth, wokism, Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, and “big agriculture.” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

With guest Ivan Phillips, we discuss and debate subjective vs objective morality. Does the concept of objective morality ever make sense given “Hume’s guillotine”? Can humans ever really live as though morality is subjective? Along the way, we take detours into Bayesian epistemology vs critical rationalism. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

How does ChatGPT really work? Is there a relationship between a program like ChatGPT and artificial general intelligence (AGI)? This time we review the famous paper "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4" from Microsoft Research as well as Melanie Mitchell's criticisms of it. Other papers mentioned: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (2015) GPT-4 Technical Report (2023) Language Models are Few-Shot Learners...

This week we have criminologist Brian Boutwell on again for part 2 of our discussion on critical rationalism and social science. Does all science share the same structure? How do you apply Popper's epistemology to social sciences? Are there laws of human nature? If humans are universal explainers, what does it mean to study our behavior? See episode 68 for a summary of Caldwell's "Clarifying Popper" that we discuss. --- Send in a voice message:...

Bruce Caldwell (a scholar interested in Popper and Hayek) wrote a long paper in the Journal of Economic Literature (March 1991) called 'Clarifying Popper'. In this episode, Bruce Nielson summarizes and discusses Caldwell’s paper on how Popper’s ideas could be applied to economics. How well did Bruce Caldwell do in his goal of clarifying Popper's epistemology? Out next episode is another interview with Brian Boutwell and we discuss this paper a few times. So this summary will help those...

Though our guest Mark Biros is clearly immersed in critical rationalism and the worldview of Popper and Deutsch, he also has some fairly strong criticisms of some of the ideas popular in what could be called the CritRat community. Here we try to work out our differing ideas on environmentalism, epistemology, quantum mechanics, social media, optimism, monarchies, cults, human extinction, and more. --- Send in a voice message:...

Historian Matt Bowman discusses his new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America. Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first and most famous persons who claimed to be abducted by aliens. Aside from being a story about UFOs, their life story hinges on a complicated relationship with religion, race, politics, science, and psychology in America in the 50s and 60s. --- Send in a voice message:...

What did David Deutsch get right and wrong in chapter 11, “Time: The First Quantum Concept,” from his first book, Fabric of Reality? Is the flow of time real or an illusion? What does it mean to have free will in a deterministic world? And what are the implications of Bruce’s “Turing world within a Turing world” thought experiment? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast:...

What did Karl Popper really mean by refutation? How are empirical theories special? How do objective criticisms differ from subjective criticisms? What is the difference between a theory and an explanation? We consider these questions with a tangent into the theory that animals don’t have feelings. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Brian Boutwell is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi who specializes in “quantitative genetics, with a focus on environmental and psychological risk factors for antisocial and violent behavior.” He has a TED talk, numerous articles in Quillette, and has been published in many journals. Here we discuss his upcoming meta-analysis on twin studies soon to be published in Nature. We discuss the following two articles: Behavioural genetic methods by Willoughby,...

Is the government hiding a secret UFO recovery program? What should the critical rationalist attitude be towards these kinds of claims? Why exactly would aliens want to hide from us? We discuss these questions and much more. If you missed it, be sure to check out the congressional hearings on UFOs (UAPs). It was actually quite interesting. Mick West's video criticizing the theory that aliens are behind all this. --- Send in a voice message:...

What did Popper say about corroboration in science? Can a theory NEVER be supported with evidence in any sense at all? Is the Popperian “war on words” justified? Are the positivists, Bayesianists, verificationists, and inductivists really wrong about EVERYTHING? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

We interview Bruce’s nephew, Brendon Nielson, who is a well-known electronic music artist under the name Dvddy. We discuss how he uses AI as a tool to create music and how this technology is changing how we work and learn. Could AI liberate us from menial labor and education? Along the way, Cameo makes an AI-generated comic book about David Deutsch. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast:...

A deep dive into David Deutsch’s “principle of optimism” featuring Sam Kuypers, Vaden Masrani, Hervé Eulacia, Micah Redding, Bill Rugolsky, and Daniel Buchfink. (Plus, of course, Peter and Bruce). Are all evils due to a lack of knowledge? Are all interesting problems soluble? ALL the problems, really?!?! And what exactly is meant by interesting? Also, should “good guys” ignore the precautionary principle, and do they always win? What is the difference between cynicism, pessimism, and...

Back in 2012, David Deutsch wrote an article called "Creative Blocks: How Close are we to Creating Artificial Intelligence?" This article inspired Bruce to go back to school and study Artificial Intelligence and get a Master's degree in the field. A decade later, a lot has changed in the field of AI, and the field has never seemed so exciting. But are we really any closer to the goal of true universal intelligence? We take a look back at the article and assess it from the vantage point of...

Does every one of us live forever in the multiverse? Is death a solvable problem? What is “quantum suicide”? Is quantum torment a concern? Does every fantastical thing we can imagine occur somewhere in the multiverse? What are “Harry Potter universes? Are we Boltzmann brains? Bruce, Cameo, and Peter consider these questions in this week’s episode. Image from jupiterimages on Freeimages.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Special guest, Lulie Tanett, asked me if she could come on my podcast and interview me about religion. Lulie and Peter ask me numerous religion-related questions such as: How is the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e. Mormon church) similar and different from Deutsch's Four Strands worldview? What might the Deutsch Four Strands worldview learn from religion? In a modern world, what (if anything) can religion still teach us? Is religion an ally or a foe...

We continue our discussion of ⁠Dwarkesh Patel's article "Contra David Deutsch on AI"⁠ compared to ⁠Brett Hall's tweet on IQ theory⁠. This time we concentrate on criticisms of Brett Hall's theory.  Along the way, we ask the ultimate question: Why did Karl Popper make his epistemology specifically about refuting empirical scientific theories instead of just generalizing it (like Deutsch does) to criticizing all theories and ideas? And why is this important? And then, we talk about...

In this episode, we continue our discussion of Dwarkesh Patel's article "Contra David Deutsch on AI" compared to Brett Hall's tweet on IQ theory. This time we concentrate on criticisms of Patel's Hardware+Scaling hypothesis. To Patel's credit, he admits that his hypothesis is problematic.  Then Peter asks Bruce about why Brett Hall believes explanatory universality implies 'equal intellectual capacity'. Bruce gives a steelmanned version of Brett's theory that takes us through an explanation...

Dwarkesh Patel published an article called "Contra David Deutsch on AI". This article was actually a defense of IQ theory against the charge (often made by fans of David Deutsch) that the existence of Explanatory Universality destroys IQ theory entirely. But how accurately does Dwarkesh portray Deutsch's view? (For that matter, how accurately do fans of David Deutsch portray Deutsch's viewpoint?) And how good are Patel's criticisms of Deutsch's view?  With some help from a tweet from Brett...

In our previous episode, we asked if Karl Popper was Dogmatic. We also introduced the idea that Karl Popper wasn't convinced that dogmatism was always bad. In this episode, we further explore Karl Popper's idea that dogmatism is sometimes a good thing. We also ask difficult questions like 'How can you tell when you are being dogmatic?' and 'Is it possible to overcome your own dogmatism?' --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/four-strands/support

There seems to be broad agreement, even among Karl Popper's own students, that he was a deeply dogmatic individual. In this episode we ask the question 'Was Karl Popper Dogmatic?' by reviewing a humorous article in Scientific American by John Horgan on August 22, 2018. Along the way, we discuss by what means we judge dogmatism. How do we even tell if someone is dogmatic or not? Is there a litmus test for dogmatism? If so, what is it?  Link to John Horgan's article. --- Support this...

Blake Lemoine, the ex-Google engineer, claims LaMDA -- Google's language model -- is sentient. Is he right? Alan Turing is perhaps most famous for his "Turing Test" which is a test of intelligence. David Deutsch has some interesting things to say about the Turing Test in "The Beginning of Infinity." Unfortunately, Deutsch's critique of the Turing Test is often misunderstood and it has led to some of his fans disparaging the Turing Test in ways that don't make sense.  The key question is why...

Is Elon Musk right that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research is like 'summoning the demon' and should be regulated? In episodes 48 and 49, we discussed how our genes 'align' our interests with their own utilizing carrots and sticks (pleasure/pain) or attention and perception. If our genes can create a General Intelligence (i.e. Universal Explainer) alignment and safety 'program' for us, what's to stop us from doing that to future Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) that we...