Episode 1: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Experts
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Thank you. Okay, welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast. I'm Bruce Nilsen. I am a student at Georgia Tech and I'm studying computer science, particularly machine learning. And I'm also interested in the books from David Deutsch and he introduced me to Karl Popper and Karl Popper's Theory of Knowledge.

This podcast start off is really just an idea for a bunch of friends to get together and to talk about cool subjects and to have fun having a discussion. But we had the idea of stringing it together and making the thread between all the episodes. David Deutsch's idea of the theory of everything, which is he has four theories that he says are the most important theories. Karl Popper's theory is theory of knowledge, computational theory, evolution or natural selection, and metaphylactic

many worlds quantum physics. And he claims that these four theories, when taken together and blended together, form the beginning of a theory of everything, which means a theory not of unified physics, but of everything, of morality, of beauty, of art, things like that. And so we saw that as kind of a way to thread together a podcast that's about a whole bunch of different subjects into a thread that goes between them all.

So let me introduce the other people who are on the show here. So Carrie and Cameo, do you guys want to introduce yourselves? Sure. This is Carrie Adelot. I am interested in databases and data management, data analysis, all things data.

I don't have a lot of experience or knowledge of the theory of anything, Karl Popper and David Deutsch, and I'm here to chat with Bruce and learn about this kind of interesting topic. Thank you. I'm excited to join. Cameo? I'm Cameo Duran, and I manage a software company professionally, and I...

I am kind of obsessed with music in general, sci-fi literature, and technology. I'm really, really fascinated with what's happening with technology. Bruce and I have talked a lot about machine learning, primarily because our world is on the brink of change and change that we can't even anticipate what it will look like.

and what the future will look like. So mostly this is a great excuse for us to talk and ruminate about a lot of fascinating subjects. So I'm excited to be here. Oh, thank you. So just how we all know each other. So at my previous job, I worked with Cameo. In fact, she was my boss. And at

at my current job, I sit in front of Carrie and we've worked together quite a bit on projects together. I'm like a project manager and she's a development manager and we kind of tag team stuff and work together on our projects. So anyhow, that was kind of how we came together and decided to do this and thought it would be a lot of fun to just have interesting discussions. I think

all of us, whenever we get together, particularly since I have worked with Cameo and I've worked with Carrie and Carrie and Cameo haven't worked together. Whenever I'm with one of them, we immediately start getting into geeky discussions about stuff. And I think that's kind of what led to the idea of, Hey, we should record our geeky discussions and we should make a podcast out of them. So that's kind of the, the, the origin of the idea of the theory of anything podcast. And I,

As the starting point, we wanted to do probably more than one podcast talking about the theory of knowledge or of science and rationality, as I'm showing here. So...

The, there we go. Takes a second to get started there. So let's start with this quote from Karl Popper. So this is a quote about experts. He says, and if you're watching this on YouTube, you can actually see a visual, but it's unnecessary. I'm just using it as notes to, to remind me of stuff or to have stuff to it that I wanted to read. So it, you can just listen to this in the car or whatever, and you don't need the visual.

So the appeal to the authority of experts should be neither excused nor defended. It should, on the contrary, be recognized for what it is, an intellectual fashion. And it should be attacked by frank acknowledgement of how little we know, how much that little is due to people who have worked in many fields at the same time. In other words, people who aren't experts in any one field. And it should be

attacked by the recognition that the orthodoxy produced by intellectual fashions, specializations, and the appeal to authorities is the death of knowledge, and that the growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement. Now, yes, go ahead. So I'm actually curious why you chose this as a starting point to introduce people to Karl Popper.

It's maybe because it's, I think, a good place for a starting point for introducing this podcast. Okay. So I see this as there is a tendency and cameo can express her opinion on this as well. But there's definitely a tendency to sometimes defer to experts.

And to say, you know, an expert said this, and then that's kind of the end of the story. And that's the opposite of what this podcast is about, where we're going to feel free to talk about any subject we please. We don't believe it requires any special education to be able to seriously start digging into a subject and to start forming your own opinion on it. Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an interesting point. Our society is really built on experts and in a lot of places with good reason. We don't necessarily want amateur engineers or

building our buildings or at least architecting the buildings and so much of you know this quote when I say it one of the first things that strikes in me is how right now as a society we are seeing expertise and science in particularly being attacked but not in the desire of finding better knowledge just really more in the desire of destroying knowledge. Yeah.

You know, I'm going to in future slides here, I'll actually talk a little bit about that. Like the whole postmodern movement. You know, there are multiple movements that attack experts, but they're not attacking the concept of experts as people we defer to, as Karl Popper is, but they're really attacking knowledge. They're really attacking the idea that there is knowledge, things like that.

Interesting. So being that Karl Popper always was appealing to knowledge, but not particular expertise as owning that knowledge. And what we're seeing culturally right now is the actual knowledge that's being attacked, not the experts who are stating they have the knowledge. Yes.

And, you know, I want to be careful here. Experts are really great for a lot of things. And so, for instance, if you really wanted to go learn an area of knowledge, you're not going to go to someone who's not an expert first. You're probably going to go buy a book from an expert, right? Yeah. Experts often are great starting points for learning something.

What Karl Popper's really attacking here is the deference to experts, the idea that we shouldn't form our own knowledge, form our own ideas. And as we'll see as we get further into the discussion, probably won't make it to today, but really anyone can understand anything, right? There is no limit to our abilities. It may be limits to our interest. We may not want to take the time to, but we can learn things. We can understand things.

even complex, highly technical knowledge if we really want to. And so that's kind of the starting point. And for how I see this podcast, the Theory of Anything podcast, we're going to just talk about whatever we please. And it doesn't matter that any of us, that none of us are experts in what we're talking about. We just don't care. We're going to talk about it because we find it interesting and we're going to form our own opinions anyhow. Yeah, I love that.

Okay, so let me... Actually, if I could state one thing. The idea of expertise, I've noticed sometimes some experts have a tendency to present as facts some ideas that aren't necessarily facts. Yes. So I think it's important while consulting experts is great, for instance, going to the doctor, at some point, if you really care about something, you need to address original research because that's where you find...

either a lot of support for something or problems in the research, which make you really question what's going on. And I do like his idea of questioning expertise, because I think, you know, experts as people sometimes present things in ways that are a little bit, can be misleading. Yes. Yes.

And one of the things that we're going to be learning about from Karl Popper's viewpoint is the idea of fallibilism. The fact that no matter how much of an expert you are, you are still deeply fallible. And there's just no way around that. Everything we do will always be fallible. So, and that's, I think, where we're really going with this. Let me give you an example of this. This is from something online. I'm going to give two examples.

So there was an article by Kate Marvel, 2018, called Why I Don't Debate Science. Now it's

I don't show this on the slide, if you can see the slide, but this was an article about climate change, which might've been what you had in mind when you were talking about attack on experts cameo. I don't know for sure if that was what you had in mind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, just science in general being, being, being repeatedly attacked. So in her article, she says, once you put established facts up, about the world up for argument, you've already lost.

Okay. Now there's an, there's a really excellent scientist named Sabine Hassenfelder, who I love, like she's great on Twitter and I've like listened to her on podcasts and she's just got a really fun personality. And I love how she's very iconoclastic and she goes against a lot of things. She has a book called,

that she's written about how she feels the entire field of physics is off track because people are trying to go after beauty rather than knowledge. And so she's a very iconoclastic person herself. But she...

tweeted this article. And then she said in one of her tweets, I'm debating me a little bit on this. She said, I think her point is that politicians and by extension of the electorate are there to decide what to do based on facts, not to debate the facts. Okay. Remember we're doing this in, in context of climate change. Sure. And then she says, you don't persuade people into believing established scientific knowledge. Okay.

You tell them what the current level of understanding is, period. This isn't something you should even debate with non-experts.

Now, I'm somewhat sympathetic to where she's trying to come from here. I wish she had said things a little bit differently. And I'm not sure she's necessarily wrong in what she's trying to get at. And I think this one's a particularly difficult case in the case of climate change. And we could probably do a show on climate change alone and discuss my attempts to even make sense of it.

And just some of the ridiculousness that surrounds climate change on both sides that surrounds climate change, the fact that it's treated like a political football rather than an actual problem to be solved and things like that. Okay, but the simple truth is, is that there's no such thing as established scientific knowledge, right? Right. And

the other truth is, is that part of the problem with the climate change debate is that scientists that are in the climate, the, you know, the camp of the climate science camp really aren't taking the time in a lot of cases to explain it well to a lay audience in part, because they know that, you know, half that lay audience is hostile. And the other half is barely cares. Right. Right. But,

But there is an inherent problem with trying to teach to, even in something like climate change, which is a terribly complex science, one that is very hard to understand. And I think that's part of the problem is it's so opaque to the average person, even an above average person is very opaque, right? Right. But the simple truth is, is that you're just not going to make a lot of progress with people if you try to act like scientists or some sort of priesthood.

Well, also, even specific to climate change, there are no established facts. The reason why it's such an ugly debate is the science is relatively new. The data sources that we have are short.

It's actually a pretty lousy scientific experiment that we're in the middle of where we don't have a control system. I mean, the science is crappy. And this is interesting because I didn't read this article, but right about this same time, actually, all the way back in 2013,

popular science shut off all comments on their website, on their articles. And they haven't ever turned them back on. They don't allow people to comment on scientific articles about scientific things. And they published an article that said, this is why we're done accepting comments.

And they wrote a whole article about why comments are bad for science. And they said that their primary reason wasn't that they wanted to stop fostering lively debate, but that between people who were specifically trolling and like...

almost bots that were trying to overwhelm the system. They were losing their ability. They were putting so much focus into debating at a troll level where you're not actually trying to talk about science or you're just essentially defending. Right. That it obscured their ability to focus on healthy, vigorous scientific conversations. Yes.

So, and it's not like that point of view that they're expressing doesn't have merit, right? I mean, anyone who's done any sort of online discussion knows what a huge problem trolls are. The degree to which they absorb energy for no purpose at all. You know, it's, this is always going to be, and a lot of times, as we'll see as we talk about Karl Popper's theory of knowledge,

In a lot of ways, it's evolution, right? You try stuff, you see what works. And, you know, maybe kudos to scientific America for trying to turn off comments and seeing what happens. You know, I doubt that's the good long-term solution personally, but you know, I'm in favor of people trying things and trying to figure out what works when you've got a problem that you need, that you need to solve. So now here's the key point I want to make though about science.

where I, you know, perhaps disagree with Sabine and Kate on this is, um,

The pro climate changers trying to call it settled science trying to call it, you know, trying to say it's it's it's been spoken it's done and Al Gore famously said these sorts of things in his movie, you know, things like that. Is that it's just not working well. Right. I mean, it really, really isn't winning the day like they're hoping and

It is kind of a hostile thing to do, and it gets people upset. And there's a lot more going on here, and I would have to save my own views for, and my own views are very different than most people's. I actually believe that there is a climate change problem, but I believe that the correct solution is pretty much nearly the opposite of what most people who are in the pro-climate change camp, I believe

believe they're just completely on the wrong path in terms of how to solve it. So this is something that I would really like to see people study more and not just as a political football, but actually start thinking about it in terms of, okay, is this a risk that we should mitigate? Is this a problem that should be solved? And how would we do that? What would be the right way to go about that? So this particular podcast isn't about climate change, but just

about really, we don't want to defer to experts on anything like this. We want people to, which is they can educate themselves. Well, and how is this working out for you? What actually is happening is by pretending that sloppy crap science is truth that has been established.

you really end up negating all scientific study. There are a lot of places where we do actually have a much better understanding than we do. Oh, absolutely. And by pretending that something that we have a very incomplete amateurish understanding is a settled scientific problem, we destroy the validity of scientific process. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Especially when you compare it to something like vaccinations, which I think has a great field of very solid research to me. The whole anti-vax movement just has no basis, in fact. Whereas climate change, I think there's a lot to be debated there. To me, there's just, we don't have data more than, what, 100 years or so? Right. We just don't have...

As you mentioned, Camille, we don't have a lot to go on there so far. Yeah, you know, and so then if you can't trust scientists when they say that climate change is what it is, then you also can't trust scientists that say vaccinations are what they are. And there's also a lack of understanding about...

Well, I'm not going to get into that. Let's move on to your next slide. Okay. Some experts tend to present as facts things that aren't really facts. Yes.

And that is one of the inherent problems with experts, right? Is they have a lot of knowledge, but they don't know where they're wrong, right? And you can't until you have a better theory. And so a lot of times they are going, and sometimes they have no choice, but to present things as if they're facts when they really aren't. This slide here is another internet exchange on Twitter. And I just thought this one was kind of funny. So I wanted to kind of,

bring it up. So this is an example of what we might call a backdoor appeal to authority. And sometimes we end up appealing to the authority of an expert and we don't maybe even realize we're doing it, right? So part of the issue here is that there's a lot of topics to learn. There's so many of them that it's physically, you know, impossible for you to learn them all or even a small percentage of them.

So, this was a gentleman I've tried to, you know, remove names and things like that I don't know if it's public on Twitter so it's not like it's, it's secret or hidden or something, but I didn't really understand when I started debating him on Twitter, where he was coming from and somebody kind of off the side told me oh this is this guy's background and this is why he's saying what he says, but

Basically, it was a discussion about whether you could create an artificial general intelligence or not, and have a computer that could think like a human. Now, you know me, you know that that's like one of my major areas of interest.

is trying to discover that. And in fact, I went back to school to study machine learning and computer science precisely because I was so interested in this, in the topic and wanted to maybe even pursue that in the future as a PhD, if I, you know, make it that far. And this guy was arguing that you can't, that it's just impossible to have a computer program that is an artificial general intelligence and

Now, I initially took him as if he was seriously trying to discuss with me. This is probably silly for me to have thought that, but you should probably always start with the assumption the person who's discussing stuff with you is trying to be serious, right? Right, has an honest desire to have a discussion.

Right. And what I didn't know, and this is what I was told later, is that he has a religious background where in his religious beliefs, that's an impossibility. And so he was actually, I didn't know this, but he was actually defending his religious viewpoint. And I was inadvertently attacking his religious viewpoint. And you know me, you know, I don't like to attack religious viewpoints. But so what he did is he started quoting to me, Roger Penrose, which is a really interesting

Do you guys know who Roger Penrose is? Like if I say Roger Penrose, you probably don't. No, no, we know nothing. About Roger Penrose. Like if I were to say, name a famous scientist, like who comes to mind first? Einstein. Einstein. Oh, sorry. Famous modern scientists. Einstein being a little further back. I don't think...

Well, I don't know if anybody comes to mind. How about Stephen Hawkins? Oh, sure, sure, sure. Okay, he's probably the most famous. Is he still alive? I'm not even sure if he's still alive or not. I believe he is. But he's the most famous scientist ever.

probably alive today, if he's still alive or in recent history. Roger Penrose was his teacher. Okay. Okay. And Roger Penrose, now that I've given you his name, you'll see it show up all over the place, get quoted all by religious people, by other scientists, by

And he's a kind of iconoclastic sort of scientist himself. He is one of the very few scientists, he's a physicist, one of the very few scientists who doesn't believe in the possibility of AGI. And so that's one of the reasons why he gets quoted a lot by religious people who might be uncomfortable with the, most religious people, in my opinion, have no problem with AGI at all. But there are some that have problems with it.

And so I've often seen Roger Penrose quoted that effect. Well, David Deutsch in his books, when he was just briefly mentioning artificial general intelligence in one of his books, that just starting to pique my interest in the area, he mentioned that Roger Penrose was at odds with him on this. So the first thing I did is I went off and I bought Roger Penrose's books about

artificial general intelligence and his argument that it's an impossibility. And these are very complex books that have a lot of math. And, and I've learned tons of physics by reading his, but I highly recommend his books to anyone, as long as you've got the stamina to go through all the math, you know, and he is, he is a fantastic scientist. And I've just got, I'd say after David Deutsch, Roger Penrose is my second favorite author. Um,

But having taken the time to go through his books and to carefully read them and then to go out and read other books that I can understand what he was talking about. I came to a point where I realized his argument was wrong. And it was just a problem to argument and

with, we could do a separate podcast about this, about AGI, but basically he's trying to use something called Goldil's theorem to show that AGI is an impossibility. And Goldil's theorem is a paradox where a mathematical paradox, it's exactly equivalent to Russell's paradox, where I say something like, you know, cameo can't read this, this sentence at consistently as true. And then there's no way for you to read it as true because it's a paradox. It,

it's the exact same sort of trick right and he's using that to say based on this paradox i can show that a computational system always has a hole in it like this and therefore and whereas humans don't or so he argues the problem is that humans have the exact same hole right is the russell's paradox is an example of how humans have the exact same hole sure and just as i

I can make this sentence for cameo and you can immediately understand what I mean. Well, how do you do that? Well, you think of yourself as me or Carrie or somebody else. Then you read the sentence. Then you understand it from a different person's viewpoint. Then you flip back to being your viewpoint. And it's really not that hard to make sense of the sentence, even though it's quote theoretically impossible for you to do so. Well, if you had an AGI, we do the same thing, right? It's not going to do something different than us. It's going to have the same limitations as us.

But it's going to have the same tools as us to deal with a paradox like that. Okay, it's not like Star Trek where you, you, Captain Kirk says, you know, I always lie and then suddenly the computer blows up or something like that. Right. And that really was Penrose's argument. It took me a long time to really become convinced that that was, that was what he was saying, and that it really was a weak argument.

So I started to explain to this guy, oh, I've read his books and here's his argument and here's the weakness of the argument.

And he immediately comes back and you can see the next tweet down below where he says, well, that, you know, that that's his point. And he's saying that something outside the system can, it has to be something outside the system to bring understanding to the system. Humans can do that. Computers can't AGI is just computations. We can't conclude our way to consciousness. Well, I had just barely explained why that wasn't a good argument and he'd ignored it entirely and,

And he was just simply re-quoting Penrose. And so I pointed that out to him and he immediately does the next tweet where he says, okay, so something as dumb as plants can exploit certain features of quantum mechanics, but the most complex living thing in the known universe, the brain, does nothing of the sort. This is a terrible argument. I mean, it's got nothing to do with anything as far as I can tell. And for that matter, yeah,

It just doesn't matter. I mean, maybe the brain does use quantum mechanics, but so what? You know, it just doesn't have any relevance to anything. Right. And so I point that out to him. And then he posts up quantum computation is not normal computation.

And one of the things I explained was that it doesn't matter because quantum computation is really just the same as normal computation. It's just it can be faster in some cases. There's a few little exceptions between differences between analog and digital that are kind of esoteric. But for the most part, anything that you can do on a normal digital computer, you can do on a quantum computer and vice versa. Okay.

Okay. They're, they're functionally equivalent, just differences in speed. And Roger Penrose brings this out in his book and points out that he's not arguing that the brain is a quantum computer because that would get you nothing. Okay. This is like a very important part of his book where he brings this out. Right. Well, this guy completely ignores that instead gives me a video. I explained that to him and he gives me this video of, of,

Richard Feynman explaining that quantum computation is not normal computation. Well, I've just barely explained to him what the difference is and how it's not normal in a technical level of detail. And at some point I realized, oh,

oh, he's not really okay. He's just this, and somebody on the side says, oh, by the way, he's religious. This is why he's doing them. Oh, okay. And I kind of backed out of the conversation at that point. One of the things that is interesting though, is that this whole exchange, there was no actual attempt to understand Penrose's argument, right? And if there had been, I had actually done a really good job of summarizing Penrose's arguments and then explaining the problems with Penrose's arguments.

The issue is that as far as this guy was concerned, the very fact that Roger Penrose is a smart guy was good enough, right? I can quote Roger Penrose and then I'm done. And this is a very common thing, right? It's so hard to take the time. I mean, I spent hours and days reading Penrose's books and learning the math and, you know,

obviously I'm doing it because I think it's fun. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in me doing it, but it's a little unrealistic that I'm going to expect everybody else to do that. But on the other hand, that means that sometimes we end up just kind of inadvertently deferring to experts when really Penrose is making an argument and there's nothing important here about Penrose other than the fact that he's made an argument and we can go assess the argument. I blame religion for this. Yeah.

No, I mean it a little bit seriously because what a religious system gives you, specifically a religious system that has documentation, is the ability to end the argument by quoting the expert. I pulled up the Ten Commandments. There's no more conversation about...

whether it's okay to take a life or not conversation done i quoted the expert um so so we have as a people regardless of the type of religion that's a part of what a religious belief is built around is that god said a thing and now that thing is truth in other words infallibility yeah yeah so i kind of disagree though because i

I think that sometimes we defer to experts as sort of a shortcut to knowledge because you can't study everything in your life. You can't just research every little thing that you come across. And so I think there is value in just deferring to experts. But if you're going to study something, if this is your field of interest, you kind of have to stop doing that. Yeah.

Let me give you a halfway in between point of view based on a conversation I had with a guy I worked with. So there was, it's, it's rare that you find somebody that you feel comfortable talking politics with these days, right? People get so bent out of shape so quickly. So there's this guy at work who was a very political conservative kind of guy. And he,

he would argue with me a lot. Now, I'm a conservative myself. So mind you, one of the reasons why this worked was because we weren't so different in our opinions to begin with, right? But he quickly started to catch on to the fact that

that I wouldn't buy a lot of the conservative arguments and that I would make him argue his point. And I would say, actually, I've looked into this and here's, you know, when we debated climate change, for example, and I started to explain to him what the climate science was. And he had a hard time with that. And I explained, okay, I understand this is a difficult subject, but, and we would debate this. And at one point he got to the point where he was starting to really discuss things with me. And it's where you get somebody who's willing to do that. So I actually, you know, have to,

say kudos to him. And we'd get a little heated, but then he'd calm down and say, no, those are good points. Let me think about that, you know. And we would be debating things. And then he would, he came to me at one point and he said, you know, I feel like a lot of these things that, you know, we're talking about, it really just boils down to education. Now, you probably heard this argument before. This is a really common argument. Just really boils down to education. We need to educate people better on these subjects. And I said, you know, Travis, I'm, I

it's not like I disagree with you, but would you consider me, you know, uneducated? He goes, oh no, definitely not. You know, you're definitely educated. I said, would you consider me someone who's like really tried to understand political issues? He goes, oh, definitely. I've got no issue with you at all. I wasn't trying to say that there was a problem with you. I said, you know what? I feel like I'm just stupid most of the time. I feel like I've tried so hard

to educate myself on all these different issues and i'm just like barely scratching the surface and there just isn't physical time for me to go educate myself on everything and it's just it's it's an incomputable thing i just can't do it he goes oh that's an interesting point

I said, to some degree, I think we just have no choice, right? We have to rely on an expert's opinion, like going to the doctor, because we may not have the ability to spend the time to go get our own medical degree and figure things out. Now, there's an obvious thing

thing to this though, you, when you go to the doctor, you may only have one problem, you don't need a whole medical degree, you just need to go educate yourself on your one problem. And that's, that may even be a really good idea. Right. And so there is this kind of this truth that

experts are always going to be with us because as Kami, I don't think she said it on this podcast, but past has said society is built on experts. And to some degree, that's just true. On the other hand, experts aren't a priesthood, right? They, they're, you can always, there's always problems with their knowledge. There's always things that they're getting wrong at any given moment.

And it's okay for you to go educate yourself and then challenge them. Right. It's okay for you to challenge people that have higher IQs than you. Right. Because people with high IQs get things wrong all the time. Right. Yeah. So.

Okay. So why this podcast? Because we want to talk about cool stuff we like. We believe you should try your best to understand difficult topics rather than trust experts. We're probably going to be wrong a lot. Who cares? Oh, well, that's just part of, you know, experts are wrong a lot too. So it doesn't make a difference. If you're interested, go do your own learning after you listen to the podcast and figure out what we got wrong and don't trust us any more than you trust anyone else.

Because we're trying to just talk about any subject we find interesting, our topics are going to be ridiculously diverse. They're going to include science, religion, philosophy, politics, maybe dance, Star Wars, superheroes, you know, whatever it is that we find interesting. And we're absolutely going to do a Star Wars episode. That is absolutely for sure. We'll have to wait until we don't give away spoilers. Yes.

So, and the only real thread is the idea of theory of knowledge, the idea that it's okay for us to dig into things, try to make sense of it, and to not defer to experts.