Listener Note:

We strongly recommend watching the video for this one, available both on youtube and spotify:
- https://www.youtube.com/@incrementspod
- https://open.spotify.com/show/1gKKSP5HKT4Nk3i0y4UseB

We discuss

• The incentives of superforecasters
• Arguments by authority
• Whether superintelligence is right around the corner
• The difference between model size and data
• Are we running out of high quality data?
• Does training on synthetic data work?
• The assumptions behind the AGI claims
• The pitfalls of reasoning from trends

References

• Michael I Jordan
• Neil Lawrence
  
• [Important technical paper from Jordan pushing back on Doomerism](A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI)
• Jordan article talking about dangers of using AlphaFold data
• Nature paper showing you can't use synthetic data to train bigger models
• Paper estimating of when training data will run out (Coincidentally enough, sometime between 2027-2028)

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
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

But how many cubes until we get to AGI though? Send a few of your cubes over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Episode header image from here.

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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
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us revoke the UN charter and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
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Form a nation and liberate yo' selves over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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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
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us calibrate our credences and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

What do Benny Chugg and Adolf Eichmann have in common? I mean, what don't they have in common? Tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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From The Theory of Anything Podcast description: Are all evils due to a lack of knowledge? Are all interesting problems soluble? ALL the problems, really?!?! And what exactly is meant by interesting? Also, should “good guys” ignore the precautionary principle, and do they always win? What is the difference between cynicism, pessimism, and skepticism? And why is pessimism so attractive to so many humans?

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
• Help us solve problems and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Which unsolvable problem would you most like to solve? Send your answer via quantum tunneling to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guests: Bruce Nielson and Sam Kuypers.

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This is a sneak preview into the land of patreon bonus episodes, so be sure to fork over some cold hard cash if you'd like a bit more mansplaining in your life.

We discuss

• Harassment of women in various spheres of life
• The patriarchy as a set of facts versus a causal explanation
• Why conflating these two notions of the patriarchy harms progress
• Domains where women are doing better than men (hint: education, mental health, and psychopathy)
• Why it's so hard to talk about this
• Why Canada is different than Afghanistan (OR IS IT)

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
• Help us pay for men's rights posters and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help with upholding the patriarchy here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube over hur.

Who is a better meninist? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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To help us think through the potential risks and rewards of ever more impressive machine learning models, we invited Rosie Campbell on the podcast. Rosie is on the safety team at OpenAI and, while she's more worried about the existential risks of AI than we are, she's just as keen on some debate over a bottle of wine.

We discuss:

• Whether machine learning poses an existential threat
• How concerned we should be about existing AI
• Whether deep learning can get us to artificial general intelligence (AGI)
• If AI safety is simply quality assurance
• How can we test if an AI system is creative?

References:

• Mathgen: Randomly generated math papers

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Follow Rosie at @RosieCampbell or https://www.rosiecampbell.xyz/
• 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

Prove you're creative by inventing the next big thing and then send it to us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Rosie Campbell.

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We discuss

• What is The Myth of the Framework?
• The relationship between the myth of the framework and epistemological and moral relativism
• Modern examples of the myth, including Jon Haidt's recent Atlantic essay and Paul Graham's Keep your identity small.
• Why there's more to learn from conversations where the participants disagree, and why conversations with too much agreement are uninteresting
• Linguistic relativism and the evolution of language as a refutation of the myth
• The relationship between the myth of the framework and the Enigma of Reason

Quotes

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

- Paul Graham, Keep your identity small

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

- Jonathan Haidt, Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

The proponents of relativism put before us standards of mutual understanding which are unrealistically high. And when we fail to meet these standards, they claim that understanding is impossible.
- Karl Popper, MotF, pg. 34

The myth of the framework can be stated in one sentence, as follows. A rational and fruiful discussion is impossible unless the participants share a common framework of basic assumptions or, at least, unless they have agreed on such a framework for the purpose of the discussion.

As I have formulated it here, the myth sounds like a sober statement, or like a sensible warning to which we ought to pay attention in order to further rational discussion. Some people even think that what I describe as a myth is a logical principle, or based on a logical principle. I think, on the contrary, that it is not only a false statement, but also a vicious statement which, if widely believed, must undermine the unity of mankind, and so must greatly increase the likelihood of violence and of war. This is the main reason why I want to combat it, and to refute it.
- Karl Popper, MotF, pg. 34

Although I am an admirer of tradition, and conscious of its importance, I am, at the same time, an almost orthodox adherent of unorthodoxy: _I hold that orthodoxy is the death of knowledge, since the growth of knowledge depends entirely on the existence of disagreement. Admittedly, disagreement may lead to strif, and even to violence. And this, I think, is very bad indeed, for I abhor violence. Yet disagreement may also lead to discussion, to argument, and to mutual criticism. And these, I think, are of paramount importance. I suggest that the greatest step towards a better and more peaceful world was taken when the war of swords was first supported, and later sometimes even replaced, by a war of words. This is why my topic is of some practical significance._

- Karl Popper, MotF, pg. 34

My thesis is that logic neither underpins the myth of the framework nor its denial, but that we can try to learn from each other. Whether we succeed will depend largely on our goodwill, and to some extent also on our historical situation, and on our problem situation.

- Karl Popper, MotF, pg. 38

References

• Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid, by Jonathan Haidt
• Keep your identity small, by Paul Graham
• The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
• Glenn Loury and Briahna Joy Grey
• Normal Science and its Dangers

Social media everywhere
Follow us on twitter (@Incrementspod, @VadenMasrani, @BennyChugg), and on youtube.

Tell us about your shaken framework at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Image: Cornelis Anthonisz (1505 – 1553) – The Fall of the Tower of Babel (1547)

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• The conflict between Galileo and the church
• What is instrumentalism, and how did it become popular?
• How instrumentalism is still in vogue in many physics departments
• The Problem of Universals
• The essentialist approach to science
• Stars, air, cells, and lightning
• "What is" vs "How does" questions
• The relationship between essentialism and language, and its influence on politics.
• Viewing words as instruments

See More:

• Instrumentalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism
• Essentialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
• The problem of universals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals

Quotes:
Few if any of the physicists who have now accepted the instrumentalist view of Cardinal Bellarmino and Bishop Berkeley realize that they have accepted a philosophical theory. Nor do they realize that they have broken with the Galilean tradition. On the contrary, most of them think that they have kept clear of philosophy; and most of them no longer care anyway. What they now care about, as physicists, is (a) mastery of the mathematical formalism, i.e. of the instrument, and (b) its applications; and they care for nothing else.
-- C&R, Page 134

Thus my criticism of essentialism does not aim at establishing the non-existence of essences; it merely aims at showing the obscurantist character of the role played by the idea of essences in the Galilean philosophy of science (down to Maxwell, who was inclined to believe in them but whose work destroyed this belief). In other words my criticism tries to show that, whether essences exist or not, the belief in them does not help us in any way and indeed is likely to hamper us; so that there is no reason why the scientist should assume their existence.
-- C&R, Page 141.

But they are more than this, as can be seen from the fact that we submit them to severe tests by trying to deduce from them some of the regularities of the known world of common experience i.e. by trying to explain these regularities. And these attempts to explain the known by the unknown (as I have described them elsewhere) have immeasurably extended the realm of the known. They have added to the facts of our everyday world the invisible air, the antipodes, the circulation of the blood, the worlds of the telescope and the microscope, of electricity, and of tracer atoms showing us in detail the movements of matter within living bodies. All these things are far from being mere instruments: they are witness to the intellectual conquest of our world by our minds.

But there is another way of looking at these matters. For some, science is still nothing but glorified plumbing, glorified gadgetmaking—‘mechanics’; very useful, but a danger to true culture, threatening us with the domination of the near-illiterate (of Shakespeare’s ‘mechanicals’). It should never be mentioned in the same breath as literature or the arts or philosophy. Its professed discoveries are mere mechanical inventions, its theories are instruments—gadgets again, or perhaps super-gadgets. It cannot and does not reveal to us new worlds behind our everyday world of appearance; for the physical world is just surface: it has no depth. The world is just what it appears to be. Only the scientific theories are not what they appear to be. A scientific theory neither explains nor describes the world; it is nothing but an instrument.
-- C&R, Page 137-8.

What's the essential nature of this podcast? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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• technology as filling niches
• when is outrage appropriate? 
• the upsides of social media 
• conversation as a substitute for violence 

Much love to everyone and stay safe out there! Send us some feedback at incrementspodcast@gmail.com 

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Ben persuades Vaden that all prisoners should be let loose. Vaden convinces Ben that he shouldn’t use the word “vista” so regularly. At least they stay on topic this time. 

References: 

• What is the PIC? What is Abolition?, Critical Resistance. 
• Is Prison Necessary? NY Times piece covering Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 
• What is Prison Abolition, The Nation. 

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We attempt to talk about Epistemic Modesty: broadly, the idea that one should be modest in their beliefs when other people (with similar credentials) disagree with them. Vaden however, entirely immodestly, tries abandoning the subject because he’s scared of Ben’s forceful arguments and derails the conversation on to the entirely uncontroversial subject of which systems of moral decision making are best suited for moral progress. A flabbergasted Ben tries to keep up, but too little too late. Most of the time he's just trying to get his microphone to behave anyway. 

References:

• In defence of epistemic modesty; Greg Lewis. 
• Against Modest Epistemology; Eliezer Yudkowski. 
• Podcast with Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty.  

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