this is the Lex free podcast where we
abridge The Lex podcast With Love by replacing everything Lex says
with a pleasant guitar strum enjoy oh well that's interesting because I didn't
see Shifu as being the teacher who was the teacher ugue Master ugue the turtle oh the turtle right
they only meet twice in the entire film and and the first conversation sort of doesn't count so
the magic of the film in fact its point is that the teaching that really matters is transferred
uh during a single
conversation and it's very brief and so who played that role in my life I
would say uh either uh my grandfather uh Harry Rubin and his wife Sophie Ruben my grandmother
or Tom Lair Tom Lair yeah in which way if you give a child Tom Lara records what you do is
you destroy their ability to be taken over by later malware and it's so irreverent so
witty so clever so obscene that it destroys the ability to lead a normal life for many
people so if I meet somebody who's usually really shifted from
any kind of neurotypical
presentation I'll often ask them uh are you a Tom lir fan and the odds that they will
respond are quite high now Tom Lair is uh poisoning pigeons in the park Tom lir that's
very interesting there are a small number of Tom L songs that broke into the general population
poisoning pigeons in the park the element song and perhaps the Vatican rag mhm uh so when you meet
somebody who knows those songs but doesn't know oh you're judging me right now aren't you harshly
uh
no but you're a Russian so undoubtedly you know Nikolai Ivanovich luchesi that song yeah
U so that was a song about plagiarism that was in fact plagiarized which most people don't know
from Danny K uh where Danny Kay did a song called Stannis lovsky of the musy Arts and so Tom lar
did This brilliant job of plagiarizing a song about and making it about plagiarism and then
making about this mathematician who worked in non- ukian Geometry that was like uh giving
heroin to a child it was extrem
ely addictive and eventually led me to a lot of different
places one of which may have been a PhD in mathematics and he was also at least a lecturer
in mathematics I believe at Harvard something like that yeah I just had dinner with him in
fact um when my son turned 13 we didn't tell him but um his bar mitzvah present was dinner
with his hero Tom lar and Tom lar was 88 years old sharp as attack irreverent and funny as hell
and just you know there are very few people in this world that you h
ave to meet while they're
still here and that was definitely one for our family no I I think that it's absolutely connected
to intelligence you can you can see it there's a place where Tom L decides that he's going to
Lampoon Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan and he's going to outdo Gilbert with clever meaningless
word playay and he has forget the well let's see he's doing Clementine as if Gilbert and Sullivan
wrote it and he says that I miss her depressor young sister name this Mr toester sh
e tried
pestering sister is a festering blister you best to resist her say I the sister persisted the
Mr resisted I kissed her all loyalty slipped when he when she said I could have her her sister's
cadaver must surely have turned in its Crypt that's so dense it's so insane yeah that that's
clearly intelligence um because it's hard to construct something like that if I look at my
favorite Tom ly Tom L lyric you know there's a perfectly absurd one which is once all the Germans
were warlike
and mean but that couldn't happen again we taught them a lesson in 1918 and they've
hardly bothered us since then right that is a different kind of intelligence you know you're
taking something that is so horrific and you're you're sort of making it palatable and funny and
demonstrating also um just your Humanity I mean I think the thing that came through as as Tom Lara
wrote all of these terrible horrible lines was just what a sensitive and Beautiful Soul he was
who was channeling pain thr
ough humor and through Grace well you do need the environment to
create the broad Slavic soul I don't think that uh many Americans really appreciate um
Russian humor how you had to joke during the time of let's say article 58 under Stalin you
had to be very very careful you know that the concept of a Russian satirical magazine like
crocodile uh doesn't make sense so you have this cross-cultural problem that there are
certain areas of human experience that it would be better to know nothing
about and
quite unfortunately Eastern Europe knows a great deal about them which makes the you
know the songs of Vladimir visotsky so potent the uh you know the pros of Pushkin whatever
it is uh you have to appreciate the depth of the Eastern European experience and I I would
think that perhaps Americans knew something like this around the time of the Civil War or
M maybe um you know under slavery in Jim Crow or even the uh harsh tyranny of uh the coal
and steel employers during the labor
Wars um but in general I would say it's hard for us to
understand and imagine the collective culture unless we have the system of selective pressures
that for example uh Russians were subjected to oh I don't think so I think almost
everything is good about war except except for death and destruction right without
the death it would bring uh the romance of it the whole thing is nice well this is why
we're always caught up in war and we have this very ambiguous relationship to it is
that it
makes life real and pressing and meaningful and at an unacceptable
price and the price has never been higher oh no no no in the physical world well
yes the physical robots can't self-replicate but but you there's a very tricky point which
is that the only thing that we've been able to create that's really complex that has
an analog of our reproductive system is software let's not call it digital let's call
it the logical World versus the physical world why logical well because even though w
e had
let's say Einstein's brain preserved uh it was meaningless to us as a physical object because
we couldn't do anything with what was stored in it at a logical level and so the idea that
something may be stored logically and that it may be stored physically uh are not necessarily
uh we don't always benefit from synonymizing I'm not suggesting that there isn't a material
basis to The Logical world but that it does warn uh identification with a separate layer that
need not um invoke logi
c gates and zeros and ones artificial out intelligence artificial
out intelligence yes this is the only essay that John Brockman ever invited me to
write that he refused to publish an edge sure what I was thinking about is why it is
that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial general intelligence when in fact artificial
life uh is terrifying in and of itself and it's already here so in order to have a system
of selective pressures you need three distinct elements you need variation wit
hin a population
you need heritability and you need differential success so what's really unique and I've made
this point I think elsewhere about software is that if you think about what humans know how
to build that's impressive so I always take a car and I say does it have an analog of each
of the physical physiological systems does it have a skeletal structure that's its frame does it
have a a neurological structure it has an onboard computer has a digestive system the one thing it
does
n't have is a reproductive system but if you can call spawn on a process effectively you
do have a reproductive system and that means that you can create something with variation
heritability and differential success now the next step in the chain of thinking was where do
we see inanimate non-intelligent life outwitting intelligent life and um I have two favorite
systems and I try to stay on them so that we don't get raed one of which is the ofre Orchid
um subspecies or subcl I don't know w
hat to call it a type of flower yeah it's a type of flower
that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males into uh engaging
it was called pseudocopulation with the fake female which is usually represented by the lowest
petal and there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating
opportunity but the flower doesn't have to give up energ energy in the form of nectar as a lure
because it's tricking the males the other system is a part
icular species uh of muscle lampos
cillus in the clear streams of Missoura and it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that
contain its young and when the bass see this fleshy lip which looks exactly like a species of
fish that the bass like to eat the uh the young EXP exp and clamp onto the gills and parasitize
the bass and also lose the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release both of these
systems you have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form and what is
sculpting
these these convincing lures it's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies
so when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy uh those weaker mimics uh fall off
they they have terminal lines and only the better ones survive so it's an arms race between
the target species uh that is being parasitized getting smarter and this other less intelligent
or non-intelligent object getting as if smarter and so what you see is is that artificial intell
artifi
cial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us it's simply sufficient for us to
outwit ourselves so you could have a a program let's say you know one of these Nigerian scams
um that writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin uh to figure out which aspects of the
program should be kept which should be varied and thrown away and you don't need it to be in
any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario of being parasitized
by something that has no idea what
it's doing well you just if you think about the
fact that our immune systems uh don't know what's coming at them next but they have a small
set of spanning components and if it's if it's a sufficiently expressive system in that any shape
uh or binding region can be approximated uh with with the Lego that is present um then you can
have confidence that you don't need to know what's coming at you because the combinatorics
um are sufficient to reach any configuration needed well we're at a we'
re sort of tumbling
down a hill at accelerating speed so whether or not we're proponents or it doesn't really
matter it may not matter but may not well I do feel that there are people who' have held
things back and uh you know died poorer than they might have otherwise been we don't even know
their names I don't think that we should discount the idea that having the smartest people showing
off how smart they are by what they've developed may be a terminal process I'm I'm very mindful
in pa
rticular of a beautiful letter that Edward Teller of all people wrote to Leo Ziller where
Ziller was trying to figure how to control the use of atomic Weaponry at the end of World
War II and Teller rather strangely because many of us view him as a monster um showed
some very Advanced moral thinking talking about the slim chance we have for survival and
that the only hope is to make war Unthinkable I do think that not enough of us feel in our
gut what it is we are playing with when when we w
ere working on technical problems and I would
recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it uh a movie called the bridge over the uh Bridge on the
River Quai about I believe captured British PS who just in a desire to do a bridge well
end up over collaborating with their Japanese captors I'm not saying I know the
answer I'm just saying that I could make a decent case for either our need to
talk about this and to become technolog logically focused on containing it or need
to stop talking about thi
s and try to hope that the relatively small number of Highly
Adept individuals who are looking at these problems is small enough that we should
in fact be talking about how to contain them well the idea is that the researchers we
know and those that we don't know who may live in countries that don't wish us to know
what what level they're currently at are very disciplined in keeping these uh things
to themselves I of course I will point out that there's a religious school in Kerala that
de
veloped something very close to the calculus uh certainly in terms of infinite Series in um
in I I guess religious uh prayer uh and and uh and rhyme and Pros so you know it's not that
Newton had any ability to hold that back and I don't really believe that we have an ability
to hold it back I do think that we could change the proportion of the time we spend worrying
about the effects what if we are successful rather than simply trying to succeed and
hope that we'll be able to contain things
later just take any parasitic system you know make make sure that there's some way in
which that there's differential success heritability and and variation and
those are the Magic ingredients and if you really wanted to build a
nightmare machine make sure that the system that expresses the variability
uh has a spanning set so that it can learn to arbitrary levels uh by making it
sufficiently expressive that's your nightmare parasitism the dividing line between
parasitism and symbiosis is
not so clear that's what they tell me about marriage I'm still single
so I don't well um yeah I we could go into that too but um no I think we have to appreciate you
know are you infected by your own mitochondria right uh right yeah so you know in marriage you
fear the loss of Independence but even though the American uh Therapeutic Community may be
very concerned about codependence what's to say that codependence isn't what it's necessary
to have a stable uh relationship in which to raise
children who are maximally K elected
and require incredible amounts of care because you have to wait 13 years before there's any
reproductive payout and most of us don't want our 13-year-olds having kids that's a very tricky
situation to analyze I would say that um predators and parasites Drive much of our Evolution and I
don't know whether to be angry at them or thank them I don't think we've really felt where we
are you know occasionally we get a wakeup 911 was so anomalous compared to e
verything we've
everything else we've experienced on American soil that it came to us as a complete shock that
that was even a possibility what it really was was a highly creative and determined R&D team uh
deep in the bowels of of Afghanistan um showing us that we had certain exploits that we were
open to that nobody had chosen to express I I can think of several of these things that I don't
talk about publicly that just seem to have to do with um how relatively unimaginative those who
wi
sh to cause havoc and destruction have been up until now but the great mystery of our time of
of this particular little era is how remarkably stable we've been since 1945 when we demonstrated
the ability to use uh nuclear weapons in anger and we don't know why things like that haven't
happened since then we've had several close calls we've had mistakes we've had uh brinksmanship and
what's now happened is that we've settled into a sense that oh it's it'll always be nothing it's
been so long
since something was at that level of danger that we've got a wrong idea in our
head and that's why when I went on the bench Shiro show I talked about the need to resume above
ground testing of nuclear devices because we have people whose developmental experience suggests
that when let's say Donald Trump and uh North Korea engage on Twitter oh it's nothing it's just
posturing everybody's just in it for money there's there there's an a sense that people are in a
video game mode which has bee
n the right call since 1945 we've been mostly in video game mode
it's amazing so you're worried about a generation which has not seen any existential we've lived
under it you see you're younger you I don't know if if and again you came from from Moscow yeah
there was a a TV show called the day after that had a huge effect uh on a generation uh growing
up in the US us and it talked about what life would be like after a nuclear exchange we have not
gone through an embodied experience collecti
vely where we've thought about this and I think it's
one of the most irresponsible things that the elders Among Us have done which is to provide this
beautiful garden in which the Thorns are cut off of the of the rose bushes and all of the edges
are are rounded and sanded and so people have developed this this totally unreal idea which is
everything's going to be just fine and do I think that my leading concern is Agi or my leading
concern is uh thermonuclear exchange or Gene drives or any
one of these things I don't know
but I know that our time here in this very long experiment here is finite because the toys that
we've built are so impressive and the wisdom to accompany them has not materialized and I I think
it's we actually got a wisdom uptick since 1945 we had a lot of dangerous skilled players on the
world stage who nevertheless no matter how bad they were managed to not embroil us in something
that we couldn't come back from the Cold War yeah and the distance from the
Cold War you know I'm
very mindful of uh there was a Russian tradition actually of on your wedding day going to visit
uh a memorial to those who gave their lives can you imagine this where you you on the happiest
day of your life you go and you pay homage to the people who fought and died in the Battle of
Stalingrad um I'm not a huge fan of Communism I got to say but there were a couple of things that
the Russians did that were really positive in the Soviet era and I think trying to let pe
ople know
how serious life actually is is a is the Russian model of seriousness is better than the American
model and maybe like you mentioned there was a small echo of that after 9/11 but but we would
we wouldn't let it form we talk about 9/11 but it's 912 that really moved the needle when we were
all just there and nobody wanted to speak we some we we witnessed something super serious and we
didn't want to uh run to our computers and blast out our deep thoughts and our feelings and it was
profound because we woke up briefly there you know I talk about the Gated institutional narrative uh
that sort of programs our lives that I've seen it break three times in my life one of which was
the election of Donald Trump another time was the fall of Leman Brothers when everybody who
knew that Bear Sterns wasn't that important knew that Leman Brothers met AIG was next and the other
one was 911 and so if I'm 53 years old and I only remember three times that the the global narrative
was
really interrupted that tells you how much we've been on top of developing events you know I
mean we had the moral F Federal Building explosion but it didn't cause the narrative to break it
wasn't profound enough around 9912 we started to wake up out of our Slumber and the powers that
be did not want a coming together they you know the admonition was go shopping the the powers
would be was what is that Force as opposed to blaming individual we don't know so whatever that
whatever that forc
e is there's a component of it that's emergent and there's component of it that's
deliberate so give yourself a portfolio with two components some amount of it is emergent but
some amount of it is also an understanding that if people come together they become an incredible
force and what you're seeing right now I think is there are forces that are trying to come together
and there forces that are trying to push things apart and you know one of them is the globalist
narrative versus the nati
onal narrative where to the global uh globalist perspective uh the N
nations are bad things in essence that they're temporary they're nationalistic they're jingoistic
it's all negative to people in the National more in the National idium they're saying look this is
where I pay my taxes this is where I do my Army service this is where I have a vote this is where
I have a passport who the hell are you to tell me that because you've moved into some place that
you can make money globally that y
ou've chosen to abandon other people to whom you have a special
and elevated Duty and I think that these competing narratives have been pushing towards the global
perspective uh from the elite and a larger and larger number of disenfranchised people are saying
hey I I actually live in a in a place and I have laws and I speak a language I have a culture
and who are you to tell me that because you can profit in some far away land that my obligations
to my fellow countrymen are so so much dimi
nished well I think that these are tensions and my
point isn't I mean nationalism run a muck is a nightmare and internationalism run a muck is
a nightmare and the problem is we're trying to push these pendulums uh to some place where
they're somewhat balanced where we we have a higher duty of care to those uh who share
our law our laws and our citizens ship but we don't forget our duties of care to the global
system I would think this is Elementary but the problem that we're facing concerns
the
ability for some to profit at the aband by abandoning their obligations uh to others within
their system and that's what we've had for decades don't trust his optimism listen I'm
Russian so I never trust a guy who's that optimistic no it's just that you're talking about
a guy who's looking at a system in which more and more of the kinetic energy like War has been
turned into potential energy like unused nuclear weapons well they already are and they're not
when when seen as um a colle
ctive you mean well I mean I I I I can mean all sorts of things but
certainly many of the things that we thought were peculiar to general intelligence do not require
general intelligence so that's been one of the big Awakenings that you can write a pretty
convincing Sports story from stats alone uh without needing to have watched the game so you
know is it possible to write Lively Pros about politics yeah no not yet so we we're sort of all
over the map one of one of the things about Chess y
ou'll there's a question I once asked on Kora
that didn't get a lot of response which was what is the greatest brilliancy ever produced by a
computer in a chess game which was different than the question of what is the greatest game
ever played so if you think about brilliancies is what really animates many of us to think of
Chess as an art form mhm those are those moves and combinations that just show such flare panana
as and and and and soul um computers weren't really great at that they
were great positional
monsters and you know recently we we've started seeing brilliancies and so few grand Masters have
identified with with Alpha zero that things were quite brilliant yeah so that's that's that's a
you know that's an example of something we don't think that that's AGI but in a very restricted
Set uh set of rules like chess you're starting to see poetry uh of a high order and and so I'm
not I don't like the idea that we're waiting for AGI AGI is sort of slowly infiltrating
our
lives in the same way that I don't think a worm should be you know the celegans shouldn't be
treated as non-conscious because it only has 300 neurons maybe it just has a very low level of
Consciousness because we don't understand what these things mean as they scale up so am I worried
about this General phenomena sure but I think that one of the things that's happening is that a lot
of us are Fring about this uh in part because of human needs we've always been worried about the
gollum
right well the gollum is the artificially created life you know it's like Frankenstein
TCH yeah sure it's a Jewish version and um frankenberg Frankenstein yeah that's makes sense
right so the uh but we've always been worried about creating something like this this and it's
getting closer and closer and there are ways in which we have to realize that the whole thing is
com the whole thing that we've experienced our the context of Our Lives is almost certainly
coming to an end and I don't mea
n to suggest that uh we won't survive I don't know and
I don't mean to suggest that it's coming tomorrow could be 300 500 years but there's
no plan that I'm aware of if we have three rocks that we could possibly inhabit that are uh
sensible within current uh technological dreams the Earth the moon and Mars and we have a very
competitive civilization that is still forced into violence to sort out disputes that cannot
be arbitrated it is not clear to me that we have a long-term future until w
e get to the next
stage which is to figure out whether or not the einsteinian speed can be broken and that
requires our source code our source code the stuff in our brains to figure out what what do
you mean by our source code a source code of the context whatever it is that produces the
quirks the electrons the neutros oh our our source code I got it so this is you're talking
about stuff that's written uh in a higher level language yeah yeah that's right you're talking
about the lowlevel
uh the bits or lower that's what is currently keeping us here here we can't
even imagine you know we have hairbrain schemes for staying within the Einstein and speed limit
uh you know maybe if we could just drug ourselves and go into a suspended state or we could have
multiple Generations I think all that stuff is pretty silly but I think it's also pretty silly
to imagine that our wisdom is going to increase to the point that we can have the toys we have
and uh we're not going to use them f
or 500 years well first of all stick out your tongue at me okay now on the front of that tongue yeah
there was a sweet receptor mhm and next to that were salt receptors on two different sides a
little bit farther back there were sour receptors and you wouldn't show me the back of your tongue
where your bitter receptor was show the good side always okay but that was four dimensions of taste
receptors but you also had pain receptors on that tongue and probably heat receptors on that tongue
so
let's assume that you had one of each that would be six dimensions so when you eat something
you eat a slice of pizza and it's got some some uh some hot pepper on it maybe some jalapeno
you're having a six-dimensional experience dude well what if you flipped one of
the uh spatial dimensions into being a temporal Dimension and you and I were
to meet in New York City and say well where where and when should we meet say how
about I'll meet you on 36 in Lexington at 2: in the afternoon and uh
11 o'clock in the
morning that would be very confusing well so it's a convenient for us to think about time you
mean we happen to be in a delicious situation in which uh we have three dimensions of space and
one of time and they're woven together in this sort of strange fabric where we can trade off a
little space for a little time but we still only have one dimension that is picked out relative to
the other three it's very much gladus KN in the Pips do you imagine that there isn't a place
where there are four temporal Dimensions or two and two of space and time or three of time and
one of space and then would time not be playing the role of space why do you imagine that the
sector that you're in is all that there is oh it's a terrible Choice terrible choice so if
you do it inside of academics you are forced to constantly show great loyalty to the consensus
and you distinguish yourself with small almost microscopic heresies uh to make your reputation
in general MH and you ha
ve very competent people and brilliant people who are working together
who are who form very deep social networks and have a very high level of behavior at least
within mathematics and at least technically within physics theoretical physics when you go
outside you meet lunatics and crazy people Mad Men and and these are people who do not usually
subscribe to the consensus position and almost always lose their way and the key question is
will progress likely come from someone who is miraculo
usly managed to stay within the system and
is able to take on a larger amount of heresy that is sort of Unthinkable uh in which case that will
be fascinating or is it more likely that somebody will maintain a level of discipline from outside
of academics and be able to make use of the freedom that comes from not having to constantly
affirm your loyalty to the consensus of your field well the Baby Boomers can't hang on forever
what it first of all in general true and second of all in Academi
a but that's really what what
this time is about is the baby bers we didn't we're used to like Financial bubbles that last
a few years in length and then pop yes the baby boomer bubble is this really longlived thing and
all of the ideology all of the behavior patterns the Norms you know for example string theory
is an almost entirely baby boomer phenomena it was something that baby boomers were able
to do because it required a very high level of mathematical ability you don't you don't
thi
nk of uh String Theory as an original idea oh I mean it was original to veneziano probably
is older than the Baby Boomers and there are people who are younger than the Baby Boomers
who are still doing strength Theory and I'm not saying that nothing discovered within the
large string theoretic complex is wrong quite the contrary a lot of brilliant mathematics
and a lot of the structure of physics was elucidated by string theorists what do I think
of the deliverable nature of this product tha
t will not chip called String Theory I think that
it is largely an affirmative action program for highly mathematically and geometrically
talented baby boomer physics physicists so that they can say that they're working on
something within the constraints of what they will say is quantum gravity now there are other
schemes you know there's like ASM totic safety there are other things that you could imagine
doing I don't think much of any of the major programs but to have inflicted this leve
l of
loyalty through a shth well surely you don't question X well I question almost everything in
the string program and that's why I got out of physics when you called me a physicist it was
a great honor but the reason I didn't become a physicist wasn't that I fell in love with
mathematics as I said wow in 1984 1983 I saw the field going mad and I saw that mathematics
which has all sorts of problems was not going insane and so instead of studying things
within physics I thought it was muc
h safer to study the same objects within mathematics
there's a huge price to pay for that you lose physical intuition but the point is is that
it wasn't a North Korean re-education Camp either I mean I'm trying to play this role myself
to to do it to the extent of handing it over to to the more responsible more professional more
competent Community um so I think that they're wrong about a great number of their belief
structures but I do believe I mean I have a really profound LoveHate relat
ionship with this
group of people I think on the physics side oh yeah because the mathematicians actually seem
to be much more open-minded and uh well they are and they aren't they're open-minded
about anything that looks like great math right right they'll study something something
that isn't very important in physics but if it's beautiful mathematics then they'll have uh
they have great intuition about these things as good as the mathematicians are and I might
even intellectually at some
horsepower level give them the edge the theoretics theoretical
physics Community is bar nun the most profound intellectual community that we have ever created
it is the number one there is nobody in second place as far as I'm concerned like in their
spare time in the spare time they invented molecular biology what what was the origin of
molecular biology you're saying phys something like Francis Crick I mean a lot of a lot of the
early molecular biologists were physicists yeah I mean you k
now schoninger wrote what is
life and that was highly inspirational I mean you have to appreciate that there is no
Community like the basic research community in theoretical physics and it's not something I'm
highly critical of these guys I think that they just wasted the you know decades uh of time
with um and your religious Devotion to their misconceptualized intellectual collapse ever
witnessed within academics you see it as a collapse or just a lull oh I'm terrified that
we're about to
lose the Vitality we can't afford to pay these people um we can't afford to give
them an accelerator just to play with in case they find something at the next energy level
these people created our economy they gave us the rad lab and radar they gave us two Atomic
devices to end World War II they created the semiconductor and the transistor to power our
economy through Moore's Law uh as a positive externality of particle accelerators they created
the worldwide web and we have the insolence
to say why should we fund you with our taxpayer
dollars no the question is are you enjoying your physics dollars right we these guys signed
the world's worst licensing agreement right and if if they simply charged for every time you used
a transistor or a URL uh or enjoyed the peace that they have provided um during this period of time
through the terrible weapons that they developed uh or you're Communications devices all of the
things that power our economy I really think came out of phys
ics even to the extent the chemistry
came out of physics and molecular biology came out of physics so first of all you have to know
that I'm very critical of this community second of all it is our most important Community we've
neglected it we've abused it we don't take it seriously we don't even care to get them to rehab
after a couple of generations of failure right no one I think the youngest person uh to have really
contributed to the standard model at a theoretical level was born in 19
51 right Frank wilch and
almost nothing has happened um that in theoretical physics after 1973 74 that sent somebody to
Stockholm for theoretical development the predicted experiment so we have to understand that
we are doing this to ourselves now with that said these guys have behaved abysmally in my opinion
um because they haven't owned up to where they actually are what problems they're really facing
how definite they can actually be they haven't shared some of their most brilliant disco
veries
which are desperately needed in other fields like gauge Theory which at least the mathematicians can
can share which is an upgrade of the differential calculus of Newton and livets and they haven't
shared the importance of renormalization theory uh even though this should be standard operating
procedure for people across the Sciences dealing with different layers and different levels of
phenomena and by shared you mean communicated in such a way that it uh disseminates throughout
th
e different science these guys are sitting both theoretical physicists and mathematicians
are sitting on top of a giant stockpile of intellectual gold right they have so many things
that have not been manifested anywhere I was just on Twitter I think I mentioned the hberman
switch pitch that shows the self-duality of the tetrahedron realized as a linkage mechanism you
know this is like a triviality and and it makes an amazing toy that's you know built Market hopefully
a fortune for Chuck hb
erman well you have no idea how much great stuff that these priests have
in their Monastery so it's truly a love and hate relationship for you yeah sounds like it's
more on the love side this building that we're in right here yes uh is the building in which I
really put together the conspiracy between the National Academy of Sciences the national sence
Foundation uh through the government University industry research Roundtable to destroy the
bargaining power of American academics uh using
foreign labor with uh on micro in the Bas
oh yeah that was done here in this building isn't that weird and I'm I'm TR truly speaking with a
revolutionary in a radical uh no no no no no no no no no at an intellectual level I am absolutely
Garden variety I'm just straight down the middle the system that we are in this this University is
functionally insane yeah Harvard is functionally insane and we don't understand that when we get
these things wrong the financial crisis made this very clear
there was a long period where every
grown-up everybody with a tie uh who spoke in a you know in bar baritone tones uh with with
the right degree at the end of their name yeah uh we're talking about how we banish volunteer
volatility we're in the great moderation okay they were all crazy and who was who was right it
was like Nim TB right Nel rubini now what happens is is that they claimed the market went went crazy
but the market didn't go crazy the market had been crazy and what happened is
is that it suddenly
went sane well that's where we are with academics academics right now is mad as a Hatter and it's
it's absolutely evident I can show you graph after graph I can show you the internal discussions I
can show you the conspiracies Harvard's dealing with one right now over its admissions policies
for people uh of color uh who happen to come from Asia all of this madness is necessary to keep
the game going what we're talking about just on while we're on the topic of revolutio
naries as
we're talking about the danger of an outbreak of Sanity have you seen the uh American
mathematical society's publication of an essay called get out the way I
have not what's what's the idea is that white men who hold uh positions within
universities and Mathematics should vacate their positions so that young black
women can take over something like this changed a little bit recently which is that
even string theory is now admitting okay we don't this doesn't look very promising i
n the short term
right so the question is what compiles if you want to take the computer science metaphor what will
get you into a journal will you spend your life trying to push some paper into a journal or will
it be accepted easily what do we know about the characteristics of the submitter and what gets
taken up and what does not all of these fields are experiencing pressure because no field is
performing so brilliantly well um that it's revolutionizing our way of speaking and
thinking
in the ways in which we've become accustomed ultimately although look there's
this thing about popper and the scientific method that's a Cancer and a disease in the
minds of very smart people that's not really how most of the stuff gets worked out it's how
it gets checked right so and there is a dialogue between Theory and experiment but you everybody
should read Paul Direct's 1963 American Scientific American article where he he you know it's very
interesting he talks about it as if it was
about the Schrodinger equation and Schrodinger's failure
to advance his own work because of his failure to account for some phenomena the key point is that
if your theory is a slight bit off it won't agree with experiment but it doesn't mean that the
theory is actually wrong um but dur could as easily have been talking about his own equation
in which he predicted that the electrons should have an antiparticle and since the only positively
charged particle that was known at the time was the
proton Heisenberg pointed out well shouldn't
your anti particle the proton have the same mass as the electron and doesn't that invalidate your
theory so I think that direct was actually being quite potentially quite sneaky um and uh talking
about the fact that he been pushed off of his own Theory to some extent by Heisenberg um but look
we've fetishized the scientific method and popper and falsification um because it protects us from
crazy ideas entering the field so you know it's a questi
on of balancing type one and type two error
and we're pretty we were pretty maxed out in One Direction well there's pre correct currently crazy
yeah right and so you you don't want to get rid of everybody who's pre- correct and currently crazy
um the problem is is that we don't have standards in general for trying to determine who has to be
put to the sword in terms of their career and who has to be protected uh as some sort of giant time
suck pain in the ass uh who may change everything do
you think that's possible uh creating a
mechanism of those selected well you're not going to like the answer but here it comes oh
boy it has to do with very human elements we're trying to do this at the level of like rules and
fairness it's not going to work because the only thing that really understands this you ever read
the read the double helix it's a book oh you have to read this book not only did Jim Watson uh H
half discover this threedimensional structure of DNA he's also one hell
of a writer before he
became an ass uh that no he's tried to destroy his own reputation I knew about the ass I didn't
know about the good writer so Jim Watson is one of the most important people now living and uh as
I've said before Jim Watson is too important a legacy to be left to Jim Watson um that book
tells you more about what actually moves the dial right there's another story about him which
I don't don't agree with which is that he stole everything from Roslin Franklin I mean the th
e
problems that he had with Ros and Franklin are real but we should actually honor that tension in
our history by delving into it rather than having a simple solution Jim Watson talks about Francis
Crick being a pain in the ass that everybody secretly knew was super brilliant and there's an
encounter between uh charf uh who came up with the the equimolar relations between the nucleotides
who should have gotten the structure of DNA and Watson and Crick and and you know he talks about
missin
g a shiver in the heartbeat of biology this stuff is so gorgeous it just makes you tremble
even thinking about it um look we know very often who is to be feared and we need to fund the people
that we fear the people who are wasting our time need to be excluded from the conversation
you see and and you know maybe we'll make some errors in both directions but but we have
known our own people we know the pains and the asses that might work out and we know the people
who are really just blow ha
rds who really have very little to contribute most of the time it's
not 100% but you're not going to get there with rules I don't I do a different version of
it I say why is this community stable yeah that's a good uh way to analyze it what
interesting that whatever we've done has not erased the community so you know they're
taking a long shot bet that won't pan out you know maybe we just haven't thought enough
about the rationality of the square root of two and somebody brilliant will figu
re it
out maybe we will eventually Land one day on the surface of Jupiter and explore it right
these These are crazy things that will never happen this question yeah yeah because you
don't know the answer no no no no look we've been they've pushed out this cognitive Lego
to us that will just lead to Madness it's good to be challenged with things that you
disagree with the answer is no it's good to be challenged with interesting things with
which you currently disagree but that might be tru
e so I don't really care about whether
or not I disagree with something or don't disagree I need to know why that particular
disagreeable thing is being pushed out is it because it's likely to be true is it because
is there some reason because I can write I can write a computer generator uh to come up with
an infinite number of disagreeable statements that nobody needs to look at so please before you
push things at me that are disagreeable tell me why now they can do better this this is we'
re
you think so no we're engaged in some moronic back and forth where I have no idea why people
who who are capable of building Google Facebook Twitter are having us in these incredibly
low-level discussions do they not know any smart people do they not have the phone numbers
of people who can Elevate these discussions they do but this they're optimizing for a different
thing and they are pushing those people out of those rooms they're they're optimizing for
things we can't see and yes pro
fit is there nobody nobody's questioning that but they're also
optimizing for things like political control or the fact that they're doing business in Pakistan
and so they don't want to talk about all the things that they're going to be bending to in
Pakistan so the we're we're involved in a fake discussion you're having a fake conversation
with us guys we know you're having a fake conversation I do not wish to be part of your
fake conversation you know how to cool you know these units you
know High availability like
nobody's business my Gmail never goes down almost I mean I've seen the I've seen the
developers screens that people take shots of inside of Google yeah and I've heard stories
inside of Facebook and apple we're not we're engaged they're engaging Us in the wrong
conversations we are not at this low level here's one of my favorite questions why is every
piece of Hardware that I purchase in in in Tech space equipped as a listening device where where's
my physical sh
utter to cover my lens we had this in the 1970s had cameras that had lens caps you
know how much would it cost to have a security model pay five extra bucks why is my indicator
light software controlled why when my camera is on do I not see that the light light is on by
putting it as a something that cannot be bypassed why have you set up my all of my devices at some
difficulty to yourselves as listening devices and we don't even talk about this this is this this
thing is total [ __ ] [ __
] well I hope these discussions are happening about privacy they're
more difficult than you giv them it's not just privacy yeah it's about social control we're
talking about social control why do I not have controls over my own levers just have a really
cute UI where I can switch I can dial things or I can at least see what the algorithms are but you
you think that there is some deliberate choices being made here there is emergence and there is uh
intention there are two Dimensions the vect
or does not collapse onto either axis but the idea that
anybody who suggests that intention is completely absent is is a child that's really beautifully put
and uh like many things you've said is going to make me can I turn can I turn this around slightly
yeah I sit down with you and you say that you're obsessed with my feed uhhuh I don't even know
what my feed is what are you seeing that I'm not by the way that feed is Eric
R Weinstein on Twitter Eric R Weinstein seriously why why did I fi
nd
it enjoyable or what was I seeing what what are you looking for why are we doing
this what is this podcast about I know you got all these interesting people I'm
just some guy who sort of a podcast guest I'm desperate to try to change the
conversation we're having I'm very worried we've got an election in 2020 I don't think we
can afford four more years of a misinterpreted message um which is what Donald Trump was and I
don't want the destruction of our institutions they all seem hellben
t on destroying themselves
so I'm trying to save theoretical physics trying to save the New York Times trying to save our
various processes and I think it feels delusional to me that uh this is falling to a tiny group
of people who are willing to speak out without getting so freaked out that everything they say
will be misinterpreted and that their lives will be ruined through the process I mean I think
we're in an absolutely bananas period of time and I don't believe it should fall to such
a
tiny number of of shoulders to shoulder this weight all right you're a software guy right yep
a human being is a worker is an old idea yes a human being has a worker is a different object
right yes so if you think about objectoriented programming as a paradigm uh a human being has a
worker and a human being has a soul we're talking about the fact that for a period of time the
worker that a human being has was in a position to feed the soul that a human being has however we
have two sepa
rate claims on the value in society one is as a worker and the other is as a soul
and the Soul needs sustenance it needs dignity it needs meaning it needs purpose as long as your
means of support is not highly repetitive I think you have a while to go before you need to start
worrying but if what you do is highly repetitive and it's not terribly generative you are in the
crosshairs of four four loops and while loops and that's what computers excel at repetitive
behavior and when I say repet
itive I may mean I may mean things that have never happened through
combinatorial possibilities but as long as it has a looped characteristic to it you're in trouble
we are seeing a massive push towards socialism because capitalists are slow to address the fact
that a worker may not be able to make claims a a relatively undistinguished median member of our
society is still has needs to reproduce needs to have to dignity and when capitalism abandons
the median individual or you know the the
bottom 10th or whatever it it's going to do it's flirting
with with Revolution and what concerns me is that the capitalists aren't sufficiently capitalistic
to understand this you really want to court uh authoritarian control in our society because
you can't see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the
marginal product of their labor was too too low to feed their dignity as a soul so it my great
concern is that our free Society has to do with the fact
that we are self-organized I remember
looking down from my office in Manhattan when Leman Brothers collapsed and thinking who's going
to tell all these people that they need to show up at work when they don't have a financial
system to incentivize them to show up at work so my complaint is first of all not with the
socialists but with the capitalists which is you guys are being idiots you're courting Revolution
by continuing to harp on the same old ideas that well you know try try harder bo
otstrap yourself
yeah to an extent that works to an extent but we are clearly headed in a place that there's nothing
that ties together our need to contribute and our need to consume and that may not be provided by
capitalism because it may have been a temporary phenomena so check out my article on anthropic
capitalism and the new gimmick economy uh I think people are are late getting the wakeup call and we
would be doing a better job saving capitalism from it itself um because I don't want
this done under
authoritarian control and the more we insist that uh everybody who's not thriving in our society
during their reproductive years in order to have a family is failing at a personal level I mean
what a disgusting thing that we're saying what a what what a horrible message who who the hell Have
We Become that we've so bought into the Chicago model um that we can't see the humanity that we're
destroying in that process and it's I hate I hate the thought of communism I really do
my family
has flirted with it in decades past it's a wrong bad idea but we are going to need to figure
out how to make sure that those souls are Nur nourished and respected and capitalism better have
an answer and I'm betting on capitalism but I got to tell you I'm pretty disappointed with my team
so you're still on the capitalism team you just uh there's a theme Here radical radical Capital hyper
capitalism look I want I think hyper capitalism is going to have to be coupled to hyper socia
lism you
need to allow the most productive people to create wonders and you got to stop bogging them down
with all of these extra nice requirements you know nice is dead good has a future nice doesn't
have a future because nice ends up with with gool legs well it's not as simple I
people always take these things literally when you have like 280
characters to explain yourself I want to be kinder I want to
be kinder to myself I want to be kinder to others I want to be able to have heart comp
assion these things are really important
and uh I have a pretty Spectrum kind of approach to analysis I'm quite literal I can go full
Rainman on you at any given moment no I can I can uh it's facultative autism if you like and
people are going to get angry because they want autism to be respected but when you see me coding
or you see me doing mathematics I'm you know I speak with speech apnea be right down to dinner
you know we have to try to integrate ourselves and those tensions between y
ou know it's sort of
back to us as a worker and us as a soul many of us are optimizing one to the at the expense of
the other and I struggle with social media and I struggle with people making threats against
uh our families and I struggle with um just how much pain people are in and if there's one
message I would like to push out there um you're responsible everybody all of us myself included
with struggling struggle struggle mightily because you it's nobody else's job to do your struggle
for you now with that said if you're struggling and you're trying and you're trying to figure
out how to better yourself and where you've failed where you've let down your family your
friends friends your workers all this kind of stuff give yourself a break you know if if if it's
not working out I I have a lifelong relationship with failure and success there's been no period
of my life where both haven't been present in one form or another and I I do wish to say that
a lot of times people
think this is glamorous I'm about to go you know do a show with Sam Harris
people are going to listen in on two guys having a conversation on stage it's completely crazy I'm
always trying to figure out how to make sure that those people get maximum value and uh that's why
I'm doing this podcast you know just give yourself a break you owe us you owe us your struggle you
don't owe your family or your co-workers or your lovers or your family memb success um as long as
you're in there and you'r
e picking yourself up recognize that this this new situation with the
economy that doesn't have the juice to sustain our institutions has caused the people who've
risen to the top of those institutions to get quite brutal and cruel everybody is lying at the
moment nobody's really a truth teller um try to keep your Humanity about you try to recognize
that if you're failing if things aren't where you want them to be and you're struggling and
you're trying to figure out what you're doing wrong
what you could do it's not necessarily
all your fault we are in a global situation I have not met the people who are honest kind
good successful nobody that I've met is check is checking all the boxes uh nobody's getting all
tens so I just think that's an important message that doesn't get pushed out enough either
people want to hold Society responsible for their failures which is not reasonable you
have to struggle you have to try uh or they want to say you're 100% responsible for your
f
ailures which is total nonsense beautifully put Eric thank you so much for talking today
thanks for having me buddy this is the Lex podcast
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