In our fourth ep on Chapter 10 in C&R, we wrestle with Popper's treatment of verisimilutude, both the formal and informal versions. Did the project fail? Was Popper out of his mind? Does this invalidate everything?

We discuss

• Murders with ball-peen hammers
• Walking the line between verification and falsification
• Is science only after truth?
• Verisimilutude and its formalization
• Why the formalization fails
• Popper's three requirements for the growth of knowledge
• Popper's ratchet and the no ad-hoc rule

Quotes

Like many other philosophers I am at times inclined to classify philosophers as belonging to two main groups—those with whom I disagree, and those who agree with me.
- C&R, page 309

I shall give here a somewhat unsystematic list of six types of cases in which we should be inclined to say of a theory t1 that it is superseded by t2 in the sense that t2 seems—as far as we know—to correspond better to the facts than t1 , in some sense or other.

• t2 makes more precise assertions than t1 , and these more precise assertions stand up to more precise tests.
• t2 takes account of, and explains, more facts than t1 (which will include for example the above case that, other things being equal, t2 ’s assertions are more precise).
• t2 describes, or explains, the facts in more detail than t1 .
• t2 has passed tests which t 1 has failed to pass.
• t2 has suggested new experimental tests, not considered before t 2 was designed (and not suggested by t1 , and perhaps not even applicable to t1 ); and t 2 has passed these tests.
• t2 has unified or connected various hitherto unrelated problems.

- C&R, page 315

Let me first say that I do not suggest that the explicit introduction of the idea of verisimilitude will lead to any changes in the theory of method. On the contrary, I think that my theory of testability or corroboration by empirical tests is the proper methodological counterpart to this new metalogical idea. The only improvement is one of clarification.
- C&R, page 318

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The questions

From Vaden to Ben:

1. How is your side hustle going?
2. Who are some of your major influences outside of Popper?
3. How has the Popperian worldview influenced your day-to-day?
4. What is the life of a nomadic academic like?
5. What would you say to people who are considering mathematics as a career?
6. Which charities do you recommend?

From Ben to Vaden:

1. How do you feel about looksmaxxing?
2. Thoughts on medical assistance in dying?
3. Ethics of Alex Honnold free soloing Taipei 101?
4. Thoughts on Nation-Buiding?
5. Incest - into it?

Episode References

• #22 - Thinking Through Thought Experiments
• #66 - Sex Research, Addiction, and Financial Domination (w/ Aella)
• #58 - Ask Us Anything V: How to Read and What to Read
• #70 - ... and Bayes Bites Back (w/ Richard Meadows)
• #76 (Bonus) - Is P(doom) meaningful? Debating epistemology (w/ Liron Shapira)

References

• Angus Deaton debates Abhijit Banerjee: https://nyudri.wordpress.com/initiatives/deaton-v-banerjee/
• Christopher Hitchens and Robert Wright
• Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov
• Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
• The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind

Socials

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We discuss

• Ben's early reflections on Abigail Shrier's book Bad Therapy
• Why did Popper feel the need to answer this particular "what is" question?
• Can asking "what is truth" be a demogogic and bad-faith question?
• The correspondence theory of truth vs The pragmatic theory of truth vs The coherence theory of truth
• Alfred Tarski's formalization of the correspondence theory of truth
• Are there problems with the correspondence theory?
• The disagreement between Vaden and Deutsch on truth

References

• Daniel Bonevac on the Correspondence theory of truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlG_VaN1LHQ
  
• Tarki's 1944 paper on the semantic conception of truth
• Tarki's 1933 paper "On the concept of truth in formalized languages"
• Deutsch's 2022 talk on truth: Musings about Truth # Socials
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But eventually putting those disagreements aside, we return to the subject at hand: The Conjectures and Refutations Series: Chapter 10: Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Part II). Here all goes smoothly. Just kidding, we start fighting about content again almost immediately. Where are the guests to break us up when you need them.

We discuss

• Why Vaden changed his mind about "all thought is problem solving"
• Something that rhymes with wero horship
• Is Popper sloppy when it comes to writing about probability and content
• Is all modern data science based on the wrong idea? (Hint: No)
• Popper's problem-focused view of scientific progress
• How much formalization is too much?
• The difference between high verisimilitude and high probability
• Why do we value simplicity in science?
• Historical examples of science progressing via theories with increasing content

Quotes

Consciousness, world 2, was presumably an evaluating and discerning consciousness, a problem-solving consciousness, right from the start. I have said of the animate part of the physical world 1 that all organisms are problem solvers. My basic assumption regarding world 2 is that this problem-solving activity of the animate part of world 1 resulted in the emergence of world 2, of the world of consciousness. But I do not mean by this that consciousness solves problems all the time, as I asserted of the organisms. On the contrary. The organisms are preoccupied with problem-solving day in, day out, but consciousness is not only concerned with the solving of problems, although that is its most important biological function. My hypothesis is that the original task of consciousness was to anticipate success and failure in problem-solving and to signal to the organism in the form of pleasure and pain whether it was on the right or wrong path to the solution of the problem.

• In Search of a Better World, p.17 (emphasis added)

The criterion of potential satisfactoriness is thus testability, or improbability: only a highly testable or improbable theory is worth testing, and is actually (and not merely potentially) satisfactory if it withstands severe tests—especially those tests to which we could point as crucial for the theory before they were ever undertaken.
- C&R, Chapter 10

Consequently there is little merit in formalizing and elaborating a deductive system (intended for use as an empirical science) beyond the requirements of the task of criticizing and testing it, and of comparing it critically with competitors.
- C&R, Chapter 10

Admittedly, our expectations, and thus our theories, may precede, historically, even our problems. Yet science starts only with problems. Problems crop up especially when we are disappointed in our expectations, or when our theories involve us in difficulties, in contradictions; and these may arise either within a theory, or between two different theories, or as the result of a clash between our theories and our observations.
- C&R, Chapter 10

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Ben and Vaden also return to their roots in another way, and get into a nice little fight about how content relates to Bayesianism.

We discuss

• Vaden's skin care routine
• If you find your friend's lost watch and proceed to lose it, are you responsible for the watch?
• Empirical vs logical content
• Whether and how content can be measured and compared
• How content relates to probability

Quotes

My aim in this lecture is to stress the significance of one particular aspect of science—its need to grow, or, if you like, its need to progress. I do not have in mind here the practical or social significance of this need. What I wish to discuss is rather its intellectual significance. I assert that continued growth is essential to the rational and empirical character of scientific knowledge; that if science ceases to grow it must lose that character. It is the way of its growth which makes science rational and empirical; the way, that is, in which scientists discriminate between available theories and choose the better one or (in the absence of a satisfactory theory) the way they give reasons for rejecting all the available theories, thereby suggesting some of the conditions with which a satisfactory theory should comply.

You will have noticed from this formulation that it is not the accumulation of observations which I have in mind when I speak of the growth of scientific knowledge, but the repeated overthrow of scien- tific theories and their replacement by better or more satisfactory ones. This, incidentally, is a procedure which might be found worthy of attention even by those who see the most important aspect of the growth of scientific knowledge in new experiments and in new observations.

• C&R p. 291

Thus it is my first thesis that we can know of a theory, even before it has been tested, that if it passes certain tests it will be better than some other theory.

My first thesis implies that we have a criterion of relative potential satisfactoriness, or of potential progressiveness, which can be applied to a theory even before we know whether or not it will turn out, by the passing of some crucial tests, to be satisfactory in fact.

This criterion of relative potential satisfactoriness (which I formu- lated some time ago,2 and which, incidentally, allows us to grade the- ories according to their degree of relative potential satisfactoriness) is extremely simple and intuitive. It characterizes as preferable the theory which tells us more; that is to say, the theory which contains the greater amount of empirical information or content; which is logically stronger; which has the greater explanatory and predictive power; and which can therefore be more severely tested by comparing predicted facts with observations. In short, we prefer an interesting, daring, and highly informative theory to a trivial one.

• C&R p.294

Let a be the statement ‘It will rain on Friday’; b the statement ‘It willbe fine on Saturday’; and ab the statement ‘It will rain on Friday and itwill be fine on Saturday’: it is then obvious that the informative contentof this last statement, the conjunction ab, will exceed that of its com-ponent a and also that of its component b. And it will also be obviousthat the probability of ab (or, what is the same, the probability that abwill be true) will be smaller than that of either of its components.

Writing Ct(a) for ‘the content of the statement a’, and Ct(ab) for ‘thecontent of the conjunction a and b’, we have
(1) Ct(a) <= Ct(ab) >= Ct(b).

This contrasts with the corresponding law of the calculus of probability,

(2) p(a) >= p(ab) <= p(b),

where the inequality signs of (1) are inverted. Together these two laws, (1) and (2), state that with increasing content, probability decreases, and vice versa; or in other words, that content increases with increasing improbability. (This analysis is of course in full agreement with the general idea of the logical content of a statement as the class of all those statements which are logically entailed by it. We may also say that a statement a is logically stronger than a statement b if its content is greater than that of b—that is to say, if it entails more than b does.)

This trivial fact has the following inescapable consequences: if growth of knowledge means that we operate with theories of increasing content, it must also mean that we operate with theories of decreasing probability (in the sense of the calculus of probability). Thus if our aim is the advancement or growth of knowledge, then a high probability (in the sense of the calculus of probability) cannot possibly be our aim as well: these two aims are incompatible.

• C&R p.295

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In one corner, we have the estimable Sir Isaac Newton and Roger Coates (and of course Andre the Giant, upon whose shoulders they are standing), and in the other, we have Bishop Berkeley and Ernst Mach, looking to throw down at the speed of sound. Berkeley can't get Newton and his forces out of his head (literally), and boy oh boy is the fight ever on.

We discuss

• How should teachers address the "students using ChatGPT to write their essay" problem? Can we learn a bit from Stalin here?
• Is Ben basically Gandhi? (Answer: Yes of course)
• How can one be both an idealist and an empiricist?
• WTF is a 'force'???
• Instrumentalism and Essentialism
• The history of the debate between Berkeley and Newton
• The lifelong feud between Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzman
• What's the difference between essences and unobservables?
• Is Mach a filthy plagiarist?
• Who won the essentialism vs instrumentalism debate? (Answer: Neither side won. Popper won.)
  

References

• Go amuse yourselves and watch some videos of Newton's spinning bucket thought experiment.
• Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics

Quotes

Everybody who reads this list of twenty-one theses must be struck by their modernity. They are surprisingly similar, especially in the criticism of Newton, to the philosophy of physics which Ernst Mach taught for many years in the conviction that it was new and revolutionary; in which he was followed by, for example, Joseph Petzold; and which had an immense influence on modern physics, especially on the Theory of Relativity.

• Popper, C&R Chapter 6

(20) A general practical result—which I propose to call ‘Berkeley’s razor’—of this analysis of physics allows us a-priori to eliminate from physical science all essentialist explanations. If they have a mathematical and a predictive content they may be admitted qua mathematical hypotheses (while their essentialist interpretation is eliminated). If not, they may be ruled out altogether. This razor is sharper than Ockham’s: all entities are ruled out except those which are perceived.

• Popper, C&R Chapter 6

No attempt was made to show how or why the forces acted, but gravitation being taken as due to a mere "force", speculators thought themselves at liberty to imagine any number of forces, attractive or repulsive, or alternating, varying as the distance,[4] or the square, cube, or higher power of the distance, etc. At last, Ruđer Bošković[5] got rid of atoms altogether, by supposing them to be the mere centre of forces exerted by a position or point only, where nothing existed but the power of exerting a force.[6]

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imponderable_fluid

Mach's antipathy to theorizing and to the invocation of "metaphysical" and therefore unprovable notions led him to some extreme opinions. In The Conservation of Energy he remarks: "We say now that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, but this hydrogen and oxygen are merely thoughts or names which, at the sight of water, we keep ready to describe phenomena which are not present but which will appear again whenever, as we say, we decompose water.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

In Mach's world, there was to be no such thing as "explaining" in the way scientists had always understood it. Mach even went so far as to argue that the traditional notion of cause and effect-that kicking a rock makes it move, that heating a gas makes it expand —was presumptuous and therefore to be denied scientific status.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

But it was not always so. Well into the latter half of the 19th century, most scientists saw their essential task as the measurement and codification of phenomena they could investigate directly: the passage of sound waves through air, the expansion of gas when heated, the conversion of heat to motive power in a steam engine. A scientific law was a quantitative relationship between one observable phenomenon and another.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

Errata

• Vaden incorrectly said this that this essay was referenced in Mach's wikipedia page. Wrong! Fool! It was Berkeley's wiki page # Socials
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Follow Kasra on twitter and subscribe to his blog, Bits of Wonder.

We discuss

• Has Popper had of a cultural impact?
• The differences between Popper, Deutsch, and Deutsch's bulldogs.
• Is observation really theory laden?
• The hierarchy of reliability: do different disciplines have different methods of criticism?
• The ladder of abstractions
• The difference between Popper and Deutsch on truth and abstraction
• The Deutschian community's reaction to the essay

References

• Bruce Nielson's podcast on verification and falsification: https://open.spotify.com/episode/38tGZnBlHK3vZHjyLgSs4C
• Popper on certainty: Chapter 22. Analytical Remarks on Certainty in Objective Knowledge

Quotes

By the nature of Deutsch and Popper’s ideas being abstract, this essay will also necessarily be abstract. To combat this, let me ground the whole essay in a concrete empirical bet: Popper’s ideas about epistemology, and David Deutsch’s extensions of them, will forever remain in the footnotes of the history of philosophy. Popper’s falsificationism, which was the main idea that he’s widely known for today, will continue to remain the only thing that he’s widely known for. The frustrating fact that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as a more influential philosopher than Popper will continue to remain true. Critical rationalism will never be widely recognized as the “one correct epistemology,” as the actual explanation (or even the precursor to an explanation) of knowledge, progress, and creativity. Instead it will be viewed, like many philosophical schools before it, as a useful and ambitious project that ultimately failed. In other words, critical rationalism is a kind of philosophical deadend: the Deutschian deadend.
- Kasra in the Deutschian Deadend

There are many things you can directly observe, and which are “manifestly true” to you: what you’re wearing at the moment, which room of your house you’re in, whether the sun has set yet, whether you are running out of breath, whether your parents are alive, whether you feel a piercing pain in your back, whether you feel warmth in your palms—and so on and so forth. These are not perfectly certain absolute truths about reality, and there’s always more to know about them—but it is silly to claim that we have absolutely no claim on their truth either. I also think there are even such “obvious truths” in the realm of science—like the claim that the earth is not flat, that your body is made of cells, and that everyday objects follow predictable laws of motion.

- Kasra in the Deutschian Deadend

Deutsch writes:

Some philosophical arguments, including the argument against solipsism, are far more compelling than any scientific argument. Indeed, every scientific argument assumes the falsity not only of solipsism, but also of other philosophical theories including any number of variants of solipsism that might contradict specific parts of the scientific argument.

There are two different mistakes happening here.
First, what Deutsch is doing is assuming a strict logical dependency between any one piece of our knowledge and every other piece of it. He says that our knowledge of science (say, of astrophysics) implicitly relies on other philosophical arguments about solipsism, epistemology, and metaphysics. But anyone who has thought about the difference between philosophy and science recognizes that in practice they can be studied and argued about independently. We can make progress on our understanding of celestial mechanics without making any crucial assumption about metaphysics. We can make progress studying neurons without solving the hard problem of consciousness or the question of free will.

- Kasra in the Deutschian Deadend, quoting Deutsch on Solipsism

At that time I learnt from Popper that it was not scientifically disgraceful to have one's hypothesis falsified. That was the best news I had had for a long time. I was persuaded by Popper, in fact, to formulate my electrical hypotheses of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission so precisely and rigorously that they invited falsification - and, in fact, that is what happened to them a few years later, very largely by my colleagues and myself, when in 1951 we started to do intra- cellular recording from motoneurones. Thanks to my tutelage by Popper, I was able to accept joyfully this death of the brain-child which I had nurtured for nearly two decades and was immediately able to contribute as much as I could to the chemical transmission story which was the Dale and Loewi brain-child.

- John C. Eccles on Popper, All Life is Problem Solving, p.12

In order to state the problem more clearly, I should like to reformulate it as follows.
We may distinguish here between three types of theory.
First, logical and mathematical theories.
Second, empirical and scientific theories.
Third, philosophical or metaphysical theories.

-Popper on the "hierarchy of reliability", C&R p.266

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We discuss

• Deontology vs consquentialism vs virtue ethics
• Kant's Categorical Imperative
• Kant's contributions to cosmology and politics
• Kant as a defender of the enlightenment
• Romanticism vs (German) idealism vs critical rationalism
• Kant's cosmology and cosmogony
• Kant's antimony and his proofs that the universe is both finite and infinite in time
• Kant's Copernican revolution and transcendental idealism
• Kant's morality
• Why Popper admired Kant so much, and why he compares him to Socrates

Quotes

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! "Have courage to use your own understanding!" --that is the motto of enlightenment.

• An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (Translated by Ted Humphrey, Hackett Publishing, 1992)

(Alternate translation from Popper: Enlightenment is the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutelage . . . of incapacity to use his own intelligence without external guidance. Such a state of tutelage I call ‘self-imposed’ if it is due, not to lack of intelligence, but to lack of courage or determination to use one’s own intelligence without the help of a leader. Sapere aude! Dare to use your own intelligence! This is the battle-cry of the Enlightenment.)

- C&R, Chap 6

What lesson did Kant draw from these bewildering antinomies? He concluded that our ideas of space and time are inapplicable to the universe as a whole. We can, of course, apply the ideas of space and time to ordinary physical things and physical events. But space and time themselves are neither things nor events: they cannot even be observed: they are more elusive. They are a kind of framework for things and events: something like a system of pigeon-holes, or a filing system, for observations. Space and time are not part of the real empir- ical world of things and events, but rather part of our mental outfit, our apparatus for grasping this world. Their proper use is as instruments of observation: in observing any event we locate it, as a rule, immediately and intuitively in an order of space and time. Thus space and time may be described as a frame of reference which is not based upon experience but intuitively used in experience, and properly applicable to experience. This is why we get into trouble if we misapply the ideas of space and time by using them in a field which transcends all possible experience—as we did in our two proofs about the universe as a whole.
...
To the view which I have just outlined Kant chose to give the ugly and doubly misleading name ‘Transcendental Idealism’. He soon regretted this choice, for it made people believe that he was an idealist in the sense of denying the reality of physical things: that he declared physical things to be mere ideas. Kant hastened to explain that he had only denied that space and time are empirical and real — empirical and real in the sense in which physical things and events are empirical and real. But in vain did he protest. His difficult style sealed his fate: he was to be revered as the father of German Idealism. I suggest that it is time to put this right.
- C&R, Chap 6

Kant believed in the Enlightenment. He was its last great defender. I realize that this is not the usual view. While I see Kant as the defender of the Enlightenment, he is more often taken as the founder of the school which destroyed it—of the Romantic School of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I contend that these two interpretations are incompatible.

Fichte, and later Hegel, tried to appropriate Kant as the founder of their school. But Kant lived long enough to reject the persistent advances of Fichte, who proclaimed himself Kant’s successor and heir. In A Public Declaration Concerning Fichte, which is too little known, Kant wrote: ‘May God protect us from our friends. . . . For there are fraudulent and perfidious so-called friends who are scheming for our ruin while speaking the language of good-will.’
- C&R, Chap 6

As Kant puts it, Copernicus, finding that no progress was being made with the theory of the revolving heavens, broke the deadlock by turning the tables, as it were: he assumed that it is not the heavens which revolve while we the observers stand still, but that we the observers revolve while the heavens stand still. In a similar way, Kant says, the problem of scientific knowledge is to be solved — the problem how an exact science, such as Newtonian theory, is possible, and how it could ever have been found. We must give up the view that we are passive observers, waiting for nature to impress its regularity upon us. Instead we must adopt the view that in digesting our sense-data we actively impress the order and the laws of our intellect upon them. Our cosmos bears the imprint of our minds.
- C&R, Chap 6

From Kant the cosmologist, the philosopher of knowledge and of science, I now turn to Kant the moralist. I do not know whether it has been noticed before that the fundamental idea of Kant’s ethics amounts to another Copernican Revolution, analogous in every respect to the one I have described. For Kant makes man the lawgiver of morality just as he makes him the lawgiver of nature. And in doing so he gives back to man his central place both in his moral and in his physical universe. Kant humanized ethics, as he had humanized science.
...
Kant’s Copernican Revolution in the field of ethics is contained in his doctrine of autonomy—the doctrine that we cannot accept the command of an authority, however exalted, as the ultimate basis of ethics. For whenever we are faced with a command by an authority, it is our responsibility to judge whether this command is moral or immoral. The authority may have power to enforce its commands, and we may be powerless to resist. But unless we are physically prevented from choosing the responsibility remains ours. It is our decision whether to obey a command, whether to accept authority.
- C&R, Chap 6

Stepping back further to get a still more distant view of Kant’s historical role, we may compare him with Socrates. Both were accused of perverting the state religion, and of corrupting the minds of the young. Both denied the charge; and both stood up for freedom of thought. Freedom meant more to them than absence of constraint; it was for both a way of life.
...
To this Socratic idea of self-sufficiency, which forms part of our western heritage, Kant has given a new meaning in the fields of both knowledge and morals. And he has added to it further the idea of a community of free men—of all men. For he has shown that every man is free; not because he is born free, but because he is born with the burden of responsibility for free decision.

- C&R, Chap 6

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Boyd wrote his PhD thesis on Nabokov's 1969 novel Ada, impressing Nabokov's wife Vera so much that he was invited to catalogue Nabokov's unpublished archives. This led to Boyd's two-volume biography of Nabokov, which Vera kept on her beside table. Boyd also developed an interest in Popper, and began research for his biography in 1996, which was then promptly delayed as he worked on his book, On The Origin of Stories, which we [dedicated episode #50]((https://www.incrementspodcast.com/50) to.

In this episode, we ask Professor Boyd to contrast and compare his two subjects, by addressing the question: What could Karl Popper have learned from Vladimir Nabokov?

We discuss

• How Brian discovered Nabokov
• Did Nabokov have a philosophy?
• Nabokov's life as a scientist
• Was Nabokov simply a writer of puzzles?
• How much should author intentions matter when interpreting literature?

References

• Boyd's book on the evolutionary origins of art and literature: On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
• Our episode on the above
• Stalking Nabokov, by Boyd.
• Boyd's book on Pale Fire: Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery
• AdaOnline, annotated notes on Ada by Boyd.
• Art historian and one of Popper's close friends, Ernst Gombrich # Errata
• The Burghers of Calais is by Balzac rather than Rodin
• The Nabokov family fled Leningrad rather than Petrograd (as Petersburg had become during WWI).

Socials

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Special Guest: Brian Boyd.

Support Increments

Follow Liron on twitter (@liron) and check out the Doom Debates youtube channel and podcast.

We discuss

• Whether we're concerned about AI doom
• Bayesian reasoning versus Popperian reasoning
• Whether it makes sense to put numbers on all your beliefs
• Solomonoff induction
• Objective vs subjective Bayesianism
• Prediction markets and superforecasting

References

• Vaden's blog post on Cox's Theorem and Yudkowsky's claims of "Laws of Rationality": https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2021/the_credence_assumption/
• Disproof of probabilistic induction (including Solomonov Induction): https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00749
• EA Post Vaden Mentioned regarding predictions being uncalibrated more than 1yr out: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hqkyaHLQhzuREcXSX/data-on-forecasting-accuracy-across-different-time-horizons#Calibrations
• Article by Gavin Leech and Misha Yagudin on the reliability of forecasters: https://ifp.org/can-policymakers-trust-forecasters/
• Superforecaster p(doom) is ~1%: https://80000hours.org/2024/09/why-experts-and-forecasters-disagree-about-ai-risk/#:~:text=Domain%20experts%20in%20AI%20estimated,by%202100%20(around%2090%25).
• The existential risk persuasion tournament https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-extinction-tournament
• Some more info in Ben's article on superforecasting: https://benchugg.com/writing/superforecasting/
• Slides on Content vs Probability: https://vmasrani.github.io/assets/pdf/popper_good.pdf

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani, @liron
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Special Guest: Liron Shapira.

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(Warning: One of the two hosts maaay have revealed their Popperian dogmatism a bit throughout this episode. Whichever host that is - they shall remain unnamed - apologizes quietly and stubbornly under their breath.)

Check out Tamler's website, his podcast (Very Bad Wizards), or follow him on twitter (@tamler).

We discuss

• What is the problem of induction?
• Whether regularities really exist in nature
• The difference between certainty and justification
• Popper's solution to the problem of induction
• If whiskey will taste like orange juice next week
• What makes a good theory?
• Why prediction is secondary to explanation for Popper
• If science and meditiation are in conflict
• The boundaries of science
  

References

• Very Bad Wizards episode on induction
• The problem of induction, by Wesley Salmon
• Hume on induction

Errata

• Vaden mentions in the episode how "Einstein's theory is better because it can explain earth's gravitational constant". He got some of the details wrong here - it's actually the inverse square law, not the gravitational constant. Listen to Edward Witten explain it much better here.

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani, @tamler
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
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If you are a Very Bad Wizards listener, hello! We're exactly like Tamler and David, except younger. Come join the Cult of Popper over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image credit: From this Aeon essay on Hume. Illustration by Petra Eriksson at Handsome Frank.

Special Guest: Tamler Sommers.

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First-Past-The-Post: If it's good enough for the horses, it's good enough for us.

We discuss

• Why democracy should be about the removal of bad leaders
• How Popper's conception of democracy differs from the usual conception
• Why Popper supports first-past-the-post (FPP) over proportional representation (PR)
• How PR encourages backroom dealing and magnifies the influence of unpopular leaders
• The sensitivity of FPP to changes to popular will
• How FPP makes it easier to obtain majorities
• How majorities make it easier to trace the consequences of policies
• Deutsch and his criticism of compromise-policies.

References

• Popper on democracy (economist piece).
• Vaden's blog post
• Chapter 13: Choices of The Beginning of Infinity

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
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(Note: Early listeners of this episode have commented that this one is a bit hard to follow - highly suggest reading the text to compensate for our many confusing digressions. Our bad, our bad).

We discuss

• Are there any benefits of being bilingual?
• Popper's attack on the idea of national self-determination
• Popper's second thesis: that out own free world is by far the best society thus far
• Reductions in poverty, unemployment, sickness, pain, cruelty, slavery, discrimination, class differences
• Popper's third thesis: The relation of progress to war
• Whether Popper was factually correct about his claim that democracies do not wage wars of aggression
• Self-accusation: A unique feature to Western societies
• Popper's fourth thesis about the power of ideas
• And his fifth thesis that truth is hard to come by

References

• Conjectures and Refutations
• Definition of self-determination from Cornell Law School
• The UN Charter
• Wilson's 14 Points

Quotes

The absurdity of the communist faith is manifest. Appealing to the belief in human freedom, it has produced a system of oppression without parallel in history.

But the nationalist faith is equally absurd. I am not alluding here to Hitler’s racial myth. What I have in mind is, rather, an alleged natural right of man— the alleged right of a nation to self-determination. That even a great humanitarian and liberal like Masaryk could uphold this absurd- ity as one of the natural rights of man is a sobering thought. It suffices to shake one’s faith in the wisdom of philosopher kings, and it should be contemplated by all who think that we are clever but wicked rather than good but stupid. For the utter absurdity of the principle of national self-determination must be plain to anybody who devotes a moment’s effort to criticizing it. The principle amounts to the demand that each state should be a nation-state: that it should be confined within a natural border, and that this border should coincide with the location of an ethnic group; so that it should be the ethnic group, the ‘nation’, which should determine and protect the natural limits of the state.

But nation-states of this kind do not exist. Even Iceland—the only exception I can think of—is only an apparent exception to this rule. For its limits are determined, not by its ethnic group, but by the North Atlantic—just as they are protected, not by the Icelandic nation, but by the North Atlantic Treaty. Nation-states do not exist, simply because the so-called ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ of which the nationalists dream do not exist. There are no, or hardly any, homogenous ethnic groups long settled in countries with natural borders. Ethnic and linguistic groups (dialects often amount to linguistic barriers) are closely intermingled everywhere. Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia was founded upon the principle of national self-determination. But as soon as it was founded, the Slovaks demanded, in the name of this principle, to be free from Czech domination; and ultimately it was destroyed by its German minority, in the name of the same principle. Similar situations have arisen in practically every case in which the principle of national self- determination has been applied to fixing the borders of a new state: in Ireland, in India, in Israel, in Yugoslavia.

There are ethnic minorities everywhere. The proper aim cannot be to ‘liberate’ all of them; rather, it must be to protect all of them. The oppression of national groups is a great evil; but national self-determination is not a feasible remedy. Moreover, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, are four obvious examples of states which in many ways violate the nationality principle. Instead of having its borders determined by one settled group, each of them has man- aged to unite a variety of ethnic groups. So the problem does not seem insoluble.

• C&R, Chapter 19

How anybody who had the slightest knowledge of European history, of the shifting and mixing of all kinds of tribes, of the countless waves of peoples who had come forth from their original Asian habitat and split up and mingled when reaching the maze of peninsulas called the European continent, how anybody who knew this could ever have put forward such an inapplicable principle, is hard to understand.

• Open Society, Page 355

The nationalist religion is strong. Many are ready to die for it, fer- vently believing that it is morally good, and factually true. But they are mistaken; just as mistaken as their communist bedfellows. Few creeds have created more hatred, cruelty, and senseless suffering than the belief in the righteousness of the nationality principle; and yet it is still widely believed that this principle will help to alleviate the misery of national oppression. My optimism is a little shaken, I admit, when I look at the near-unanimity with which this principle is still accepted, even today, without any hesitation, without any doubt—even by those whose political interests are clearly opposed to it.

• C&R, Chapter 19

In spite of our great and serious troubles, and in spite of the fact that ours is surely not the best possible society, I assert that our own free world is by far the best society which has come into existence during the course of human history.

• C&R, Chapter 19

But before examining these facts more closely, I wish to stress that I am very much alive to other facts also. Power still corrupts, even in our world. Civil servants still behave at times like uncivil masters. Pocket dictators still abound; and a normally intelligent man seeking medical advice must be prepared to be treated as a rather tiresome type of imbecile, if he betrays an intelligent interest—that is, a critical interest—in his physical condition.

• C&R, Chapter 19

I have in mind the standards and values which have come down to us through Christianity from Greece and from the Holy Land; from Socrates, and from the Old and New Testaments.

• C&R, Chapter 19

My third thesis is that since the time of the Boer War, none of the democratic governments of the free world has been in a position to wage a war of aggression. No democratic government would be united upon the issue, because they would not have the nation united behind them. Aggressive war has become almost a moral impossibility.

• C&R, Chapter 19

I believe that it is most important to say what the free world has achieved. For we have become unduly sceptical about ourselves. We are suspicious of anything like self-righteousness, and we find self-praise unpalatable. One of the great things we have learned is not only to be tolerant of others, but to ask ourselves seriously whether the other fellow is not perhaps in the right, and altogether the better man. We have learned the fundamental moral truth that nobody should be judge in his own cause. This, no doubt, is a symptom of a certain moral maturity; yet one may learn a lesson too well. Having discovered the sin of self-righteousness, we have fallen into its stereotyped inversion: into a stereotyped pose of self-depreciation, of inverted smugness. Having learned that one should not be judge in one’s own cause, we are tempted to become advocates for our opponents. Thus we become blind to our own achievements. But this tendency must be resisted.

• C&R, Chapter 19

Thus we learnt not only to tolerate beliefs that differ from ours, but to respect them and the men who sincerely held them. But this means that we slowly began to differentiate between sincerity and dogmatic stub- bornness or laziness, and to recognize the great truth that truth is not manifest, not plainly visible to all who ardently want to see it, but hard to come by. And we learnt that we must not draw authoritarian conclu- sions from this great truth but, on the contrary, suspect all those who claim that they are authorized to teach the truth.

• C&R, Chapter 19 # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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We discuss

• Thoughts on the recent Trump assasination attempt
• How can Popper be an optimist with prophesying about the future?
• The scarcity value of optimism
• Russell's view that our intellectual development has outrun our moral development
• Relationship of this view to the orthogonality thesis
• Popper's competing view that our troubles arise because we are good but stupid
• How much can incentives compel us to do bad things?
• How easy it for humans to really be led by the nose
• Ben's experience during the summer of 2020

References

• Conjectures and Refutations
• Orthogonality thesis
• Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
• Adam Smith's thought experiment about losing a pinky
• Radiolab episode, "The Bad Show"

Quotes

Now I come to the word ‘Optimist’. First let me make it quite clear that if I call myself an optimist, I do not wish to suggest that I know anything about the future. I do not wish to pose as a prophet, least of all as a historical prophet. On the contrary, I have for many years tried to defend the view that historical prophecy is a kind of quackery. I do not believe in historical laws, and I disbelieve especially in anything like a law of progress. In fact, I believe that it is much easier for us to regress than to progress.

Though I believe all this, I think that I may fairly describe myself as an optimist. For my optimism lies entirely in my interpretation of the present and the immediate past. It lies in my strongly appreciative view of our own time. And whatever you might think about this optimism you will have to admit that it has a scarcity value. In fact the wailings of the pessimists have become somewhat monotonous. No doubt there is much in our world about which we can rightly complain if only we give our mind to it; and no doubt it is sometimes most important to find out what is wrong with us. But I think that the other side of the story might also get a hearing.

And whatever you might think about this optimism you will have to admit that it has a scarcity value. In fact the wailings of the pessimists have become somewhat monotonous. No doubt there is much in our world about which we can rightly complain if only we give our mind to it; and no doubt it is sometimes most important to find out what is wrong with us. But I think that the other side of the story might also get a hearing.

We have become very clever, according to Russell, indeed too clever. We can make lots of wonderful gadgets, including television, high-speed rockets, and an atom bomb, or a thermonuclear bomb, if you prefer. But we have not been able to achieve that moral and political growth and maturity which alone could safely direct and control the uses to which we put our tremendous intellectual powers. This is why we now find ourselves in mortal danger. Our evil national pride has prevented us from achieving the world-state in time.To put this view in a nutshell: we are clever, perhaps too clever, but we are also wicked; and this mixture of cleverness and wickedness lies at the root of our troubles.

My first thesis is this. We are good, perhaps a little too good, but we are also a little stupid; and it is this mixture of goodness and stupidity which lies at the root of our troubles.

The main troubles of our time—and I do not deny that we live in troubled times—are not due to our moral wickedness, but, on the contrary, to our often misguided moral enthusiasm: to our anxiety to better the world we live in. Our wars are fundamentally religious wars; they are wars between competing theories of how to establish a better world. And our moral enthusiasm is often misguided, because we fail to realize that our moral principles, which are sure to be over-simple, are often difficult to apply to the complex human and political situations to which we feel bound to apply them.

(All Popper)

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
- EO Wilson

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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We discuss

• Chapman's concept of nebulosity
• Whether this concept is covered by Popper
• The relationship of nebulosity and the vagueness of language
• The correspondence theory of truth
• If the concept of "problem situation" saves us from Chapman's critique
• Why "conjecture and criticism" isn't everything

References

• The excellent Do Explain podcast. Go listen, right now!
• In the cells of the eggplant, David Chapman
• Chapman's website
• Jake Orthwein on Do Explain, Part I

Chapman Quotes

Reasonableness is not interested in universality. It aims to get practical work done in specific situations. Precise definitions and absolute truths are rarely necessary or helpful for that. Is this thing an eggplant? Depends on what you are trying to do with it. Is there water in the refrigerator? Well, what do you want it for? What counts as baldness, fruit, red, or water depends on your purposes, and on all sorts of details of the situation. Those details are so numerous and various that they can’t all be taken into account ahead of time to make a general formal theory. Any factor might matter in some situation. On the other hand, nearly all are irrelevant in any specific situation, so determining whether the water in an eggplant counts, or if Alain is bald, is usually easy.

• David Chapman, When will you go bald?

Do cow hairs that have come out of the follicle but that are stuck to the cow by friction, sweat, or blood count as part of the cow? How about ones that are on the verge of falling out, but are stuck in the follicle by only the weakest of bonds? The reasonable answer is “Dude! It doesn’t matter!”

• David Chapman, Objects, objectively

We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

• David Chapman, The purpose of meaning

Popper Quotes

Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description presupposes a descriptive language, with property words; it presupposes similarity and classification, which in their turn presuppose interests, points of view, and problems. ‘A hungry animal’, writes Katz, ‘divides the environment into edible and inedible things. An animal in flight sees roads to escape and hiding places . . . Generally speaking, objects change . . . according to the needs of the animal.’ We may add that objects can be classified, and can become similar or dissimilar, only in this way—by being related to needs and interests. This rule applies not only to animals but also to scientists. For the animal a point of view is provided by its needs, the task of the moment, and its expectations; for the scientist by his theoretical interests, the special problem under investigation, his conjectures and anticipations, and the theories which he accepts as a kind of background: his frame of reference, his "horizon of expectations".

• Conjectures and Refutations p. 61 (italics added)

I believe that there is a limited analogy between this situation and the way we ‘use our terms’ in science. The analogy can be described in this way. In a branch of mathematics in which we operate with signs defined by implicit definition, the fact that these signs have no ‘definite meaning’ does not affect our operating with them, or the precision of our theories. Why is that so? Because we do not overburden the signs. We do not attach a ‘meaning’ to them, beyond that shadow of a meaning that is warranted by our implicit definitions. (And if we attach to them an intuitive meaning, then we are careful to treat this as a private auxiliary device, which must not interfere with the theory.) In this way, we try to keep, as it were, within the ‘penumbra of vagueness’ or of ambiguity, and to avoid touching the problem of the precise limits of this penumbra or range; and it turns out that we can achieve a great deal without discussing the meaning of these signs; for nothing depends on their meaning. In a similar way, I believe, we can operate with these terms whose meaning wehave learned ‘operationally’. We use them, as it were, so that nothing depends upon their meaning, or as little as possible. Our ‘operational definitions’ have the advantage of helping us to shift the problem into a field in which nothing or little depends on words. Clear speaking is speaking in such a way that words do not matter.

• OSE p. 841 (italics in original)

Frege’s opinion is different; for he writes: “A definition of a concept ... must determine unambiguously of any object whether or not it falls under the concept . . . Using a metaphor, we may say: the concept must have a sharp boundary.” But it is clear that for this kind of absolute precision to be demanded of a defined concept, it must first be demanded of the defining concepts, and ultimately of our undefined, or primitive, terms. Yet this is impossible. For either our undefined or primitive terms have a traditional meaning (which is never very precise) or they are introduced by so-called “implicit definitions”—that is, through the way they are used in the context of a theory. This last way of introducing them—if they have to be “introduced”—seems to be the best. But it makes the meaning of the concepts depend on that of the theory, and most theories can be interpreted in more than one way. As a result, implicity defined concepts, and thus all concepts which are defined explicitly with their help, become not merely “vague” but systematically ambiguous. And the various systematically ambiguous interpretations (such as the points and straight lines of projective geometry) may be completely distinct.

• Unending Quest, p. 27 (italics added)

What I do suggest is that it is always undesirable to make an effort to increase precision for its own sake—especially linguistic precision—since this usually leads to loss of clarity, and to a waste of time and effort on preliminaries which often turn out to be useless, because they are bypassed by the real advance of the subject: one should never try to be more precise than the problem situation demands. ... One further result is, quite simply, the realization that the quest for precision, in words or concepts or meanings, is a wild-goose chase. There simply is no such thing as a precise concept (say, in Frege’s sense), though concepts like “price of this kettle” and “thirty pence” are usually precise enough for the problem context in which they are used.

• Unending Quest, p. 22 (italics in original)

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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We discuss

• How do you "see" your early memories?
• Vaden corrects the record on a few points
• Rationality grounded in humility versus goal-oriented rationality
• If ends can be decided rationally
• How and if goal-oriented rationality leads to violence
• Working to reduce concrete evils versus working to achieve abstract goods

** Link to chapter **:

• https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20672078

Quotes

A rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.
Pg. 478

I believe that we can avoid violence only in so far as we practise this attitude of reasonableness when dealing with one another in social life; and that any other attitude is likely to produce violence—even a one-sided attempt to deal with others by gentle persuasion, and to convince them by argument and example of those insights we are proud of possessing, and of whose truth we are absolutely certain. We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell. Only if we give up our authoritarian attitude in the realm of opinion, only if we establish the attitude of give and take, of readiness to learn from other people, can we hope to control acts of violence inspired by piety and duty.
Pg. 479

In the latter case political action will be rational only if we first determine the final ends of the political changes which we intend to bring about. It will be rational only relative to certain ideas of what a state ought to be like. Thus it appears that as a preliminary to any rational political action we must first attempt to become as clear as possible about our ultimate political ends; for example the kind of state which we should consider the best; and only afterwards can we begin to determine the means which may best help us to realize this state, or to move slowly towards it, taking it as the aim of a historical process which we may to some extent influence and steer towards the goal selected. Now it is precisely this view which I call Utopianism. Any rational and non-selfish political action, on this view, must be preceded by a determination of our ultimate ends, not merely of intermediate or partial aims which are only steps towards our ultimate end, and which therefore should be considered as means rather than as ends; therefore rational political action must be based upon a more or less clear and detailed description or blueprint of our ideal state, and also upon a plan or blueprint of the historical path that leads towards this goal.
Pg. 481-482

The Utopian method, which chooses an ideal state of society as the aim which all our political actions should serve, is likely to produce violence can be shown thus. Since we cannot determine the ultimate ends of political actions scientifically, or by purely rational methods, differences of opinion concerning what the ideal state should be like cannot always be smoothed out by the method of argument. They will at least partly have the character of religious differences. And there can hardly be tolerance between these different Utopian religions. Utopian aims are designed to serve as a basis for rational political action and discussion, and such action appears to be possible only if the aim is definitely decided upon. Thus the Utopianist must win over, or else crush, his Utopianist competitors who do not share his own Utopian aims and who do not profess his own Utopianist religion.
Pg. 483

Work for the elimination of concrete evils rather than for the realization of abstract goods. Do not aim at establishing happiness by political means. Rather aim at the elimination of concrete miseries. Or, in more practical terms: fight for the elimination of poverty by direct means—for example, by making sure that everybody has a minimum income. Or fight against epidemics and disease by erecting hospitals and schools of medicine. Fight illiteracy as you fight criminality. But do all this by direct means. Choose what you consider the most urgent evil of the society in which you live, and try patiently to convince people that we can get rid of it.
Pg. 485

But do not try to realize these aims indirectly by designing and working for a distant ideal of a society which is wholly good. However deeply you may feel indebted to its inspiring vision, do not think that you are obliged to work for its realization, or that it is your mission to open the eyes of others to its beauty. Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realized. In brief, it is my thesis that human misery is the most urgent problem of a rational public policy and that happiness is not such a problem. The attainment of happiness should be left to our private endeavours.
Pg. 485

It is a fact, and not a very strange fact, that it is not so very difficult to reach agreement by discussion on what are the most intolerable evils of our society, and on what are the most urgent social reforms. Such an agreement can be reached much more easily than an agreement concerning some ideal form of social life. For the evils are with us here and now. They can be experienced, and are being experienced every day, by many people who have been and are being made miserable by poverty, unemployment, national oppression, war and disease. Those of us who do not suffer from these miseries meet every day others who can describe them to us. This is what makes the evils concrete. This is why we can get somewhere in arguing about them; why we can profit here from the attitude of reasonableness. We can learn by listening to concrete claims, by patiently trying to assess them as impartially as we can, and by considering ways of meeting them without creating worse evils
Pg. 485

I believe that it is quite true that we can judge the rationality of an action only in relation to some aims or ends. But this does not necessarily mean that the rationality of a political action can be judged only in relation to an _historical end._
Pg. 486

The appeal of Utopianism arises from the failure to realize that we cannot make heaven on earth. What I believe we can do instead is to make life a little less terrible and a little less unjust in each generation. A good deal can be achieved in this way. Much has been achieved in the last hundred years. More could be achieved by our own generation. There are many pressing problems which we might solve, at least partially, such as helping the weak and the sick, and those who suffer under oppression and injustice; stamping out unemployment; equalizing opportunities; and preventing international crime, such as blackmail and war instigated by men like gods, by omnipotent and omniscient leaders. All this we might achieve if only we could give up dreaming about distant ideals and fighting over our Utopian blueprints for a new world and a new man.
Pg. 487

** References **

• EA Forum post showing data on forecasting accuracy across different time horizons: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hqkyaHLQhzuREcXSX/data-on-forecasting-accuracy-across-different-time-horizons#Calibrations
• Vox article talking about PELTIV's: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23569519/effective-altrusim-sam-bankman-fried-will-macaskill-ea-risk-decentralization-philanthropy

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Do you see your sweeping utopian blueprints in first person or third person? Send these blueprints over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image credit: Engin_Akyurt

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We discuss

• Problems with the current peer-review system and how to improve it
• The Mind-Body Problem
• How chaos theory relates to determinism
• The four functions of language
• Why you don't argue with thermometers
• Whether Popper thinks we can build AGI
• Why causality occurs at the level of ideas, not just of atoms

References

• Link to the essay, which you should most definitely read for yourself.
• Ben's call to abolish peer-review
• Discrete Analysis Math Journal
• Pachinko
• Karl Buhler's theory of language

Quotes

This, I think, solves the so-called problem of 'other minds'. If we talk to other people, and especially if we argue
with them, then we assume (sometimes mistakenly) that they also argue: that they speak intentionally about
things, seriously wishing to solve a problem, and not merely behaving as if they were doing so. It has often been seen
that language is a social affair and that solipsism, and doubts about the existence of other minds, become
selfcontradictory if formulated in a language. We can put this now more clearly. In arguing with other people (a thing
which we have learnt from other people), for example about other minds, we cannot but attribute to them intentions,
and this means, mental states. We do not argue with a thermometer.
- C&R, Chap 13

Once we understand the causal behaviour of the machine, we realize that its behaviour is purely expressive or
symptomatic. For amusement we may continue to ask the machine questions, but we shall not seriously argue with it--
unless we believe that it transmits the arguments, both from a person and back to a person.
- C&R, Chap 13

If the behaviour of such a machine becomes very much like that of a man, then we may mistakenly believe that
the machine describes and argues; just as a man"who does not know the working of a phonograph or radio may
mistakenly think that it describes and argues. Yet an analysis of its mechanism teaches us that nothing of this kind
happens. The radio does not argue, although it expresses and signals.
- C&R, Chap 13

It is true that the presence of Mike in my environment may be one of the physical 'causes' of my saying, 'Here is
Mike'. But if I say, 'Should this be your argument, then it is contradictory', because I have grasped or realized that it is
so, then there was no physical 'cause' analogous to Mike; I do not need to hear or see your words in order to realize
that a certain theory (it does not matter whose) is contradictory. The analogy is not to Mike, but rather to my
realization that Mike is here.
- C&R, Chap 13

The fear of obscurantism (or of being judged an obscurantist) has prevented most anti-obscurantists from saying
such things as these. But this fear has produced, in the end, only obscurantism of another kind.
- C&R, Chap 13

When's the last time you argued with your thermometer? Tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image Credit: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/modernlanguages/research/groups/linguistics/

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We discuss:

• Are there philosophical problems?
• Why are scientific disciplines divided as they are?
• How much of philosophy is meaningless pseudo-babble? (Hint: Not none)
• Wittgenstein's background and feud between him and Popper
• Wittgenstein 1 and 2 (pre and post Tractatus)
• The danger of philosophical inbreeding
• Two of Popper's examples of philosophical problems: 1. Plato and the Crisis in Early Greek Atomism 2. Immanuel Kant's Problem of Knowledge.
• Musica universalis
• The Problem of Change
• How is knowledge possible?
  

Quotes

My first thesis is that every philosophy, and especially every philosophical ‘school’, is liable to degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically indistinguishable from pseudo-problems, and its cant, accordingly, practically indistinguishable from meaningless babble. This, I shall try to show, is a consequence of philosophical inbreeding. The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems which arise outside philosophy—in mathematics, for example, or in cosmology, or in politics, or in religion, or in social life. In other words my first thesis is this. Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy, and they die if these roots decay.

C&R p.95

His question, we now know, or believe we know, should have been: ‘How are successful conjectures possible?’ And our answer, in the spirit of his Copernican Revolution, might, I suggest, be something like this: Because, as you said, we are not passive receptors of sense data, but active organisms. Because we react to our environment not always merely instinctively, but sometimes consciously and freely. Because we can invent myths, stories, theories; because we have a thirst for explanation, an insatiable curiosity, a wish to know. Because we not only invent stories and theories, but try them out and see whether they work and how they work. Because by a great effort, by trying hard and making many mistakes, we may sometimes, if we are lucky, succeed in hitting upon a story, an explanation, which ‘saves the phenomena’; perhaps by making up a myth about ‘invisibles’, such as atoms or gravitational forces, which explain the visible. Because knowledge is an adventure of ideas.

C&R p.128

If you were to threaten us with a common household object, what would it be? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com, or on twitter: @VadenMasrani, @BennyChugg, @IncrementsPod.

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• The TCS parenting movement 
• Chesto's tweet to Deutsch
• How Popper's Three Worlds differs from Deutsch's Things/Qualia/Abstractions classification
• Would prime numbers exist if humans didn't exist?
• What constitutes reality?
• The existence of non-physical entities and the reality of abstractions 

 
Having a quick glance at the following wikipedia pages will help ground the conversation:

• Formal systems 
• Formal languages
• Modular Arithmetic
• Rules of inference
• Alternative Logics

Errata:

• Somewhere Vaden says English is a formal language. Nope definitely not - English is natural language, which is distinct from a formal language.  

Send us your best guess for whether or not we're real at incrementspodcast@gmail.com. 

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• Wiki on scientific laws
• Hume's dialogues concerning natural religion  
• Proof of the impossibility of probability induction 
• One of the YouTube videos on induction. 

And in case you were wondering what happened to the two unfalsifiable theories Popper attacks in this chapter, you'll be pleased to know that they have merged into a super theory. We give you Psychoanalytic-Marxism: http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/janmohamed/Psychoanalytic-Marxism.pdf.

Sent us your favorite unfalsifiable theory at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

audio updated: 29/08/2021

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