Kind: captions
Language: en
we can actually figure out where are the
aliens out there in space time by being
clever about the few things we can see
one of which is our current date
and
so now that you have this living
cosmology we can tell the story that the
universe starts out empty and then at
some point things like us appear very
primitive and then some of those
stop being quiet and expand and then for
a few billion years they expand and then
they meet each other and then for the
next hundred billion years they commune
with each other
that is the usual models of cosmology
say that in roughly
150 billion years
the expansion of the universe will
happen so much that all you'll have left
is some galaxy clusters and they that
are sort of disconnected from each other
but before then they will interact
there will be this community of all the
grabby alien civilizations and each one
of them will hear about and even meet
thousands of others
and we might hope to join them someday
and become part of that community
the following is a conversation with
robin hansen an economist at george
mason university and one of the most
fascinating wild fearless and fun minds
i've ever gotten a chance to accompany
for a time in exploring questions of
human nature human civilization and
alien life out there in our impossibly
big universe he is the co-author of a
book titled the elephant in the brain
hidden motives in everyday life
the age of m
work love and life when robots rule the
earth and a fascinating recent paper i
recommend on quote grabby aliens
titled if loud aliens explain human
earliness
quiet aliens are also rare
this is the lex friedman podcast support
it please check out our sponsors in the
description and now dear friends here's
robin hansen
you are working on a book about quote
grabby aliens this is a technical term
like the big bang uh yeah so what are
grabby aliens grabby aliens expand
fast into the universe and they change
stuff
that's the key concept so if they were
out there
we would notice that's the key idea
so the question is where are the grabby
aliens so fermi's question is where are
the aliens and we could vary that in two
terms right where are the quiet hard to
see aliens and where are the big loud
grabby aliens
so it's actually hard to say where all
the quiet ones are right
there could be a lot of them out there
because they're not doing much they're
not making a big difference in the world
but the grabby aliens by definition are
the ones you would see
we don't know exactly what they do with
where they went but the idea is they're
in some sort of competitive world where
each part of them is trying to grab more
stuff
and do something with it
and you know almost surely whatever
is the most competitive thing to do with
all the stuff they grab
isn't to leave it
alone the way it
started right so we humans when we go
around the earth and use stuff we change
it we turn a forest into a farmland
turn a harbor into a city
so the idea is
aliens would do something with it and so
we're not exactly sure what it would
look like but it would look different so
somewhere in the sky we would see big
spheres
of different activity where things had
been changed because they had been there
expanding spheres right so as you expand
you aggressively interact and change the
environment so the word grabby versus
loud you're using them sometimes
synonymously sometimes not gravity to me
is a little bit more
aggressive
what does it mean to be loud what does
it mean to be grabby what's the
difference and loud in what way is it
visual is it sound is it some other
physical phenomena like gravitational
waves what are you using this kind of in
a broad philosophical sense so there's a
specific
thing that it means to be
loud in this universe of ours my
co-authors and i put together a paper
with a particular mathematical model
and so we use the term grabby aliens to
describe that more particular model and
the idea is it's a more particular model
of the general concept of loud so loud
would just be the general idea that they
would be really obvious
so grabby is the technical term is it in
the title of the paper it's in the body
the title is actually about loud and
quiet right so the idea is there's you
know you want to distinguish your
particular model of things from the
general category of things everybody
else might talk about so that's how we
distinguish the paper titles if loud
aliens explain human earliness quiet
aliens are also rare
if life on earth god that's such a good
abstract if life on earth had to achieve
and heart and hard steps to reach
humanity's level then the chance of this
event rose as time to the nth power so
we'll talk about power we'll talk about
linear increase
so what is the technical definition of
grabby how do you envision grabbiness
and why are
uh in contrast with humans why aren't
humans grabby so like where's that line
is it well definable what is grabbing
what is non-grabby
we have a mathematical model of the
distribution of advanced civilizations
i.e aliens in space and time
that model has three parameters
and we can set each one of those
parameters from data
and therefore we claim this is actually
what we know about where they are in
space time
so the key idea is they appear at some
point in space time
and then after some short delay they
start expanding
and they expand at some speed
and the speed is one of those parameters
that's one of the three and the other
two parameters are about
how they appear in time that is they
appear at random places
and they appear in time according to a
power law
and that power law has two parameters
and we can fit each of those parameters
to data and so then we can say
now we know
we know the distribution of advanced
civilizations in space and time so
we are right now a new civilization and
we have not yet started to expand but
plausibly we would start to do that
within say 10 million years of the
current moment
that's plenty of time and 10 million
years is a really short duration in the
history of the universe so
we are
at the moment a sort of random sample of
the kind of times at which an advanced
civilization might appear because we may
or may not become grabby but if we do
we'll do it soon and so our current date
is a sample and that gives us one of the
other parameters
the second parameter is the constant in
front of the power law and that's
arrived from our current date
so power law what is the n
in the
in the power law that's the what is the
complicated thing to explain right
advanced life appeared by going through
a sequence of hard steps
so starting with very simple life and
here we are at the end of this process
at pretty advanced life and so we had to
go through some intermediate steps such
as you know sexual selection
photosynthesis multicellular animals
and the idea is that each of those steps
was hard
evolution just took a long time
searching in a big space of
possibilities to find each of those
steps
and the challenge was to achieve all of
those steps by a deadline of when the
planets
would no longer host a simple life
and so earth has been really lucky
compared to all the other billions of
planets out there and that we managed to
achieve all these steps in the short
time of the
five billion years that earth
is can support simple life so not all
steps but a lot of them because we don't
know how many steps there are before you
start the expansion so these are all the
steps from the birth
of life to the initiation of major
expansion right so we're pretty sure
that it would happen really soon so that
it couldn't be
the same sort of a hard step as the last
ones in terms of taking a long time so
when we look at the history of earth we
look at the durations of the major
things that have happened
that
suggests that there's roughly say six
hard steps that happened say between 3
and 12
and that we have just achieved the last
one that would take a long time
which is um
well we don't know
but whatever it is we've just achieved
the last one are we talking about humans
or aliens here so let's talk about some
of these steps yeah so uh earth is
really special in some way we don't
exactly know
the level of specialness we don't really
know which steps were the hardest or not
because we just have a sample of one but
you're saying that there's three to 12
steps that we have to go through to get
to where we are that are hard steps hard
to find by something that
took
uh a long time and is unlikely there's a
lot of
there's a lot of ways to fail there's a
lot more ways to fail than to succeed
the first step would be sort of the very
simplest form of life of any sort
and then um we don't know whether that
first word is the first sort that we see
in the historical record or not
but then some other steps are say the
development of photosynthesis
the development of sexual reproduction
there's the development of eukaryote
cells which are certain kind of
complicated cell that seems to have only
appeared once
and then there's multicellularity that
is multiple cells coming together to
large organisms like us
and
in this statistical model of trying to
fit all these steps into a finite window
the model actually predicts that these
steps could be a varying difficulties
that is they could each take different
amounts of time on average but if you're
lucky enough that they all appear in a
very short time then the durations
between them will be roughly equal
and the time remaining left over in the
rest of the window will also be the same
length so
we at the moment have roughly a billion
years left on earth until
simple life like us would no longer be
possible
life appeared roughly 400 million years
after the very first time when life was
possible at the very beginning
so those two numbers right there give
you the rough estimate of six hard steps
just to build up an intuition here so
we're trying to create a simple
mathematical model
of how
life emerges and expands in the universe
and there's a section in this paper how
many hard steps question mark right
the two most plausibly diagnostic earth
duration seems to be the one remaining
after now before earth becomes
uninhabitable for complex life so you
estimate how long earth lasts
how many hard steps
there's windows
for doing different hard steps and you
can sort of
uh like cueing theory mathematically
estimate of
like
uh the uh solution or the passing of the
hard steps or the taking of the hard
steps sort of like coldly mathematical
look
if life
pre-expansionary life requires a number
of steps what is the probability of
taking those steps on an earth that
lasts a billion years or 2 billion years
or 5 billion years or 10 billion years
and you say
solving for e using the observed
durations of 1.1 and 0.4 then gives e
values of 3.9 and 12.5 range 5.7 to 26
suggesting a middle estimate of at least
six that's where you said six
hard steps right
just to get to where we are right we
started at the bottom now we're here and
that took six steps on average the key
point is
on average these things on any one
random planet would take you know
trillions or trillions of trill you know
of years just a really long time and so
we're really lucky that they all
happened really fast in a short time
before our window closed
and the chance of that happening
in that short window goes as that time
period to the power of the number of
steps and so that was where the power we
talked about before it came from and so
that means in the history of the
universe we should overall roughly
expect advanced life to appear as a
power law in time
so that very early on there was very
little chance of anything appearing and
then later on as things appear other
things are appearing somewhat closer to
them in time because they're all going
as this power law
what is the power law can we for people
who are not sure math inclined can you
describe what a power so
say the function x is linear and x
squared is quadratic so it's the power
of 2. if we make x to the 3 that's
cubic or the power of 3. and so x to the
6th is the power of 6. and so we'd say
life appears in the universe on a planet
like earth in that proportion to the
time that it's been
you know uh ready for life
to appear
and that
over the universe in general it'll
appear at roughly a power law like that
what is the exponent what is n
uh is it the number of hearts yes the
number of hard steps so that's so yeah
it's like if you're gambling
and you're doubling up every time this
is the probability you just keep winning
[Laughter]
uh so
it gets very unlikely very quickly and
so we are the result of this unlikely
chain of successes it's actually a lot
like cancer so the dominant model of
cancer in an organism like each of us is
that we have all these cells and in
order to become cancerous a single cell
has to go through a number of mutations
and these are very unlikely mutations
and so any one cell is very unlikely to
have any have all these mutations happen
by the time your life spans over
but
we have enough cells in our body that
the chance of any one cell producing
cancer by the end of your life is
actually pretty high more like 40
and so the chance of cancer appearing in
the linear lifetime also goes as power
law this power of the number of
mutations that's required for any one
cell in your body to become cancerous
this is the longer you live the likely
right you are to have cancer cells and
its power is also roughly six that is
the chance of you getting cancer is at
the roughly the power of six of the
time you've been since you were born it
is perhaps not lost
on people that you're
that you're comparing the power laws of
the survival or the arrival of the human
species to cancerous cells
the same mathematical model but of
course we might have a different value
assumption about the two outcomes but of
course from the point of view of cancer
somewhere similar uh from the point of
view of cancer it's a win-win well we
both get to
we both get to thrive i suppose
um
it is interesting to take the point of
view of all kinds of life forms on earth
of viruses of bacteria they have a very
different view
and you know it's like the instagram
channel um nature is metal
right the ethic under which nature
operates doesn't often
coincide correlate with human
morals
it seems cold and
um machine like in the selection process
that it performs
i am an analyst i'm a scholar an
intellectual and i feel i should
carefully distinguish predicting what's
likely to happen
and then evaluating or judging what i
think would be better to happen
and it's a little dangerous to mix those
up too closely because then we can
have wishful thinking and so i try
typically to just analyze what seems
likely to happen regardless of whether i
like it or whether we do anything about
it and then once you see a rough picture
of what's likely to happen if we do
nothing
then we can ask well what might we
prefer and ask where could the levers be
to move it at least a little toward what
we might prefer
that's a you know useful but often doing
that just analysis of what's likely to
happen if we do nothing
offends many people
they find that you know dehumanizing or
cold or metal as you say
uh to just say well this is what's
likely to happen and you know it's not
your favorite sorry but
um maybe we can do something but maybe
we can't do that much
this is very interesting
that the the cold analysis
whether it's geopolitics whether it's
medicine
whether it's economics
sometimes misses some
very specific aspect of
um
human
condition
like for example
when you look at a doctor
and the act of a doctor helping a single
patient
if you do the analysis of that doctor's
time
and cost of the medicine or the surgery
or the transportation of the patient
this is the paul farmer question
you know is it worth spending 10 20 30
000 on this one patient
when you look at all the people that are
suffering in the world that money can be
spent so much better
and yet
there's something about human nature
that wants to help the person in front
of you and that is actually the right
thing to do
despite the analysis
and sometimes when you do the analysis
you um there's something about the human
mind that allows you to not take that
leap that
irrational leap
uh to act in this way that the analysis
explains it away well it's like uh for
example uh the u.s government
you know the d.o.t department of
transportation puts a
value of i think like 9 million dollars
on a human life and the moment you put
that number on a human life you can
start thinking well okay i can start
making decisions about
this or that and with a sort of cold
economic perspective and then you might
lose
you might deviate from a deeper truth
of what it means to be human somehow you
have to dance because uh then if you put
too much weight on the anecdotal
evidence on these kinds of human
emotions
then you're going to lose
uh you can also
probably more likely deviate from truth
but there's something about that cold
analysis like i've been listening to a
lot of people coldly analyze
wars
warren yemen warren syria
uh israel palestine
war in ukraine and there's something
lost when you do a cold analysis of why
something happened when you talk about
energy
uh
talking about sort of conflict
competition over resources when you
talk about geopolitics sort of models of
geopolitics and why a certain war
happened you lose something about the
suffering that happens
i don't know it's an interesting thing
because you're both you're exceptionally
good at
uh models
in all domains
literally um but also there's a humanity
to you
uh so it's an interesting dance i don't
know if you can comment on that dance
sure
it's definitely true as you say
that for many people
if you are accurate in your judgment of
say for a medical patient right what's
the chance that this treatment might
help
and what's the cost
and compare those to each other and you
might say
this looks like a lot of cost for a
small medical gain
and at that point
knowing that fact that might take the
wing
you know the air out of your sails
you might
not be willing to do the thing that
maybe you feel is right anyway which is
still to pay for it
um
and then somebody knowing that might
want to keep that news from you not tell
you about the low chance of success or
the high cost in order to save you this
tension this this awkward moment where
you might
fail to do what they and you think is
right
but i think the higher calling the the
higher standard to hold you to which
many people can be held to is to say
i will look at things accurately i will
know the truth and then i will also
do the right thing with it
i will be at peace with my judgment
about what the right thing is in terms
of the truth i don't need to be lied to
in order to figure out what the right
thing to do is and i think if you do
think you need to be lied to in order to
figure out what the right thing to do is
you're at a great disadvantage because
then people will be lying to you will be
lying to yourself and you won't be as
effective yes and achieving whatever
good you are trying to achieve but
getting the data getting the facts is
step one
now that's the final step absolutely so
it's uh i would say
having a good model getting the good
data
is step one and it's a burden
because you can't just use that data
to um
arrive at sort of the easy convenient
thing you have to really deeply think
about what is the right thing
you can't use the so the the dark aspect
of data
uh of models is you can
use it to excuse away actions
that are unethical you can use data to
basically excuse away anything but not
looking at data
lets you expose yourself to pretend and
think that you're doing good when you're
not
exactly
uh but it is a burden it doesn't excuse
you from
still being human and deeply thinking
about what is right
that very kind of gray area that very
subjective area
um
that's part of the human condition
but let us return for a time to aliens
so you started to define sort of the
the model the parameters
of uh grabbiness
right or the uh
as we approach crabbiness so what
happens so again when there's three
parameters yes
there's the speed at which they expand
there's the rate at which they appear in
time and that rate has a constant and a
power so we've talked about the history
of life on earth suggest that power is
around 6 but maybe 3 to 12.
we can say that constant comes from our
current date sort of sets the overall
rate
and the speed which is the last
parameter comes from the fact that we
look in the sky we don't see them so the
model predicts very strongly that if
they were expanding slowly say one
percent of the speed of light
our sky would be full of vast spheres
that were full of activity that is
at a random time when a civilization is
first appearing if it looks out into its
sky it would see many other grabby alien
civilizations in the sky and they would
be much bigger than the full moon they'd
be huge spheres in the sky and they
would be visibly different we don't see
them can we pause for a second okay
there's a bunch of hard steps that earth
had to pass to arrive at this place we
are currently which we're starting to
launch rockets out into space we're kind
of starting to expand a bit right very
slowly okay
but this is like the birth
if you look at the entirety of the
history of earth
we're now at this precipice of like
expansion we could we might not choose
to but if we do we will do it in the
next 10 million years
10 million wow
time flies when you're having fun
uh i was thinking a short time on the on
the cosmological scale so that is it
might be only a thousand but the point
is if it's even if it's up to 10 million
that hardly makes any difference to the
model so i might as well give you 10
million this this
this makes me feel i was i was so
stressed about planning what i'm going
to do today and now you've got plenty of
time plenty of time
uh i just need to be generating some
offspring quickly here okay um
so and there's this moment
[Laughter]
this 10 million
year gap uh or window when we start
expanding and you're saying okay so this
is an interesting moment where there's a
bunch of other alien civilizations that
might at some history of the universe
arrived at this moment were here they
passed all the hard steps there's a
there's a model for how
likely it is that that happens and then
they start expanding and you think of an
expansion it's almost like a a sphere
right that's when you say speed we're
talking about the speed of the radius
growth exactly like the surface how fast
the surface
okay and so you're saying that there is
some speed for that expansion average
speed and then we can play with that
parameter
and
if that speed is super slow then maybe
that explains
why we haven't seen anything if it's
super fast well it gets the slow would
create the puzzle it's low predicts we
would see them but we don't see them
okay so the way to explain that is that
they're fast so the idea is
if they're moving really fast then we
don't see them until they're almost here
and okay this is counterintuitive all
right hold on a second so i think this
works best when i say a bunch of dumb
things okay um
and then uh
you uh elucidate
the full complexity and the beauty of
the dumbness okay
so there's these spheres out there in
the universe
that are made visible because they're
sort of uh using a lot of energy so
they're generating a lot of light
they're changing things they're changing
things and change would be visible
long way off yes they would take apart
stars rearrange them restructure
galaxies they would just be kind of big
huge stuff
okay if they're expanding slowly
we would see a lot of them
because the universe is old as relative
is old enough to where we would see that
we're assuming we're just typical you
know maybe at the 50th percentile of
them so like half of them have appeared
so far the other half will still appear
later
and um the the math of our best estimate
is that they appear roughly once per
million galaxies
and we would meet them in roughly a
billion years
if uh we expanded out to meet them so
we're looking at a grabby aliens model
3d sim right
what's what's this that's the actual
name of the video what uh
by the time we get to 13.8 billion years
the fun begins
okay so this is this is a um right we're
watching a
three-dimensional sphere rotating i
presume that's the universe and then
right crabby aliens are expanding and
filling that universe exactly with all
kinds of uh and then pretty soon it's
all full it's full so that's how
the grabby aliens come
in contact first of all with other
aliens
and then um with us humans the following
is a simulation of the grabby aliens
model of alien civilizations
civilizations are born that expand
outwards at constant speed a spherical
region of space is shown by the time we
get to 13.8 billion years
this sphere will be about 3 000 times as
wide as the distance from the milky way
to andromeda
okay this is fun it's huge okay it's
huge um all right
so
why don't we see
uh we're one little tiny tiny tiny tiny
dot in that giant giant sphere right why
don't we
see any of the grabby aliens
it depends on how fast they expand
so you could see that if they expanded
at the speed of light you wouldn't see
them until they were here
uh so like out there if somebody is
destroying the universe with a
vacuum decay there's this there's this
you know doomsday scenario where
somebody somewhere could change the
vacuum of the universe and that would
expand at the speed of light and
basically destroy everything it hit but
you'd never see that until i got here
because it's expanding at the speed of
light
if you're spinning really slow then you
see it from a long way off so the fact
we don't see anything in the sky tells
us they're expanding fast say over a
third the speed of light and that's
really really fast
but that's what you have to believe if
you look out and you don't see anything
now you might say well how maybe i just
don't want to believe this whole model
why should i believe this whole model at
all and
our best evidence why you should believe
this model is our early date
we are right now
almost 14 million years into the
universe
on a
planet around a star that's roughly 5
billion years old
but the average star out there will last
roughly five trillion years
that is
a thousand times longer
and remember that power law it says that
the chance of advanced life appearing on
a planet goes as the power of sixth of
the time so if a planet lasts a thousand
times longer
then the chance of it appearing on that
planet if everything would stay empty at
least is a thousand to the sixth power
or ten to the eighteen
so
enormous
overwhelming chance that if the universe
would just stay sit and empty and
waiting for advanced life to appear when
it would appear would be
way at the end of all these
planet lifetimes that is the long
planets near the end of the lifetime
trillions of years into the future
so but we're really early compared to
that and our explanation is at the
moment as you saw in the video the
universe is filling up in roughly a
billion years it'll all be full and at
that point it's too late for advanced
life to show up so you had to show up
now before that deadline okay can we
break that apart a little bit okay
or linger on some of the things you said
so with the power law the things we've
done on earth
the model you have says that it's very
unlikely like we're lucky sobs
is that is that mathematically correct
to say
we we're crazy early that is when early
means like in the history of the
universe in the history okay so
given this model
how do we make sense of that for super
can we just be the lucky ones
well 10 to the 18 lucky you know how
lucky do you feel
uh so you know
that's pretty lucky right you know 10 to
18 is a billion billion
so then if you were just being honest
and humble
that that means
what does that mean it means one of the
assumptions that calculated this crazy
early must be wrong that's what it means
so the key assumption we suggest is that
the universe would stay empty
so
most life would appear like a thousand
times longer later than now yeah if
everything would stay empty waiting for
it to appear what was so what is
non-empty so the gravity aliens are
filling the universe right now roughly
at the moment they've filled half of the
universe and they've changed it and when
they fill everything it's too late for
stuff like us to appear but wait hold on
a second
did anyone help us get lucky
if it's so difficult what how do
like so it's like cancer right
there's all these cells each of which
randomly does or doesn't get cancer and
eventually some cell gets cancer and you
know we were one of those
but hold on a second
okay
but we got it early
early compared to the prediction with an
assumption that's wrong that's so that's
how we do a lot of you know theoretical
analysis you have a model that makes a
prediction that's wrong then that helps
you reject that model okay let's try to
understand exactly where the wrong is so
the assumption is that the universe
is empty stays empty stays empty and and
waits until this advanced life appears
in trillions of years
that is if the universe would just stay
empty if there was just
you know nobody else out there yeah then
when you should expect advanced life to
appear if you're the only one in the
universe when should you expect to
appear you should expect to appear
trillions of years in the future
i see right right so this is a very sort
of nuanced mathematical
assumption i don't think we can intuit
it
cleanly with words
uh but
if you assume that you're just wait the
universe stays empty and you're waiting
for
one
life
uh civilization to pop up
then it's gonna it should happen very
late much later than now and
if you look at earth
uh the way things happen on earth it
happened much much much much much
earlier than it was supposed to
according to this model if you take the
initial assumption therefore you can say
well the initial assumption of the
universe staying empty is very unlikely
right
and the other the other alternative
theory is the universe is filling up and
will fill up soon
and so we are typical for the origin
date of things that can appear before
the deadline before that okay it's
filling up so why don't we see anything
if it's filling up because they're
expanding really fast
close to the speed of light exactly so
we will only see it when it's here
almost here okay
uh what are the ways in which we might
see a quickly expanding
this is both exciting and terrifying it
is terrifying it's like watching a truck
like driving at you at 100 miles an hour
and uh right so we would see spheres in
the sky at least one sphere in the sky
growing very rapidly
and
like very rapidly right
yes very rapidly
so we're not so there's there's you know
different def because we were just
talking about 10 million years
this would be
you might see it 10 million years in
advance coming i mean you still might
have a long warning or again
the universe is 14 billion years old the
typical origin times of these things are
spread over several billion years so the
chance of one originating at a you know
very close to you in time is very low so
it still might take millions of years
from the time you see it from the time
it gets here
yeah a million years to be terrified
there's a bad spirit coming at you but
but coming at you very fast so if
they're traveling close to the speed of
light but they're coming from a long way
away so remember
the rate at which they appear is one per
million galaxies
right
so they're they're roughly 100 galaxies
away
i see so the delta between the speed of
light
and their actual travel speed is very
important
right so even if they're going at say
half the speed of light we'll have a
long time
yeah but what if they're traveling
exactly at a speed of light then we see
them like then we wouldn't have much
warning but that's less likely well we
can't exclude it
and they could also be somehow traveling
faster than the speed of light
or i think we can exclude because if
they could go faster than speed of light
then they would just already be
everywhere
so in a universe where you can travel
faster than the speed of light you can
go backwards in space-time so any time
you appeared anywhere in space time you
could just fill up everything yeah and
so anybody in the future whoever
appeared they would have been here by
now can you exclude the possibility that
those kinds of aliens aren't already
here
uh
well you have we should have a different
discussion of that right okay so let's
actually lead that let's leave that
discussion aside just to linger and
understand the grabby alien expansion
which is beautiful and fascinating
okay so there's these giant expanding
spheres spheres of alien civilizations
now
um
when those fears spheres collide
mathematically
it was it's very likely that we're not
the first
collision of grabby
of alien civilizations i suppose there's
one way to say it so there's like the
first time the spheres touch each other
we recognize each other right they meet
um they they recognize each other first
before they meet
um they see each other coming they see
each other coming and then so there's a
bunch of them there's a combinatorial
thing where they start seeing each other
coming and then there's a third neighbor
it's like what the hell and then there's
a fourth one okay so what does that you
think look like um what lessons
from human nature that's the only data
we
have what can you draw the story of the
history of the universe here is what i
would call a living cosmology so
what i'm excited about in part by this
model is that it lets us tell a story of
cosmology where there are actors who
have agendas
so most ancient peoples they had
cosmologies stories they told about
where the universe came from and where
it's going and what's happening out
there and their stories they like to
have agents and actors gods or something
out there doing things and lately our
favorite cosmology is dead kind of
boring
you know we're the only activity we know
about or see and everything else just
looks dead and empty but
this is now telling us no that's not
quite right at the moment the universe
is filling up and in a few billion years
it'll be all full
and from then on the history of the
universe will be the universe full of
aliens
yeah so that's a it's a really good
reminder a really good way to think
about cosmology is
we're surrounded by vast darkness and we
don't know what's going on in that
darkness
until the light
from whatever generate lights arrives
here
so we kind of yeah we look up at the sky
okay they're stars oh they're pretty but
you don't think about
the giant expanding spheres of aliens
right
see them but now you're approaching
looking at the clock if you're clever
the clock tells you so i like the
analogy with the ancient greeks so yes
you might think that an ancient greek
you know staring at the universe
couldn't possibly tell how far away the
sun was or how far away the moon is or
how big the earth is
that all you can see is just big things
in the sky you can't tell but they were
clever enough actually to be able to
figure out the size of the earth and the
distance to the moon and the sun and the
size of the moon
and sun that is they could figure those
things out actually by being clever
enough and so similarly we can actually
figure out where are the aliens out
there in space time by being clever
about the few things we can see one of
which is our current date
and
so now that you have this living
cosmology we can tell the story that the
universe starts out empty and then at
some point things like us appear very
primitive and then some of those
just stop being quiet and expand and
then for a few billion years they expand
and then they meet each other and then
for the next 100 billion years they
commune with each other
that is the usual models of cosmology
say that in roughly 100 150 billion
years
the expansion of the universe will
happen so much that all you'll have left
is some galaxy clusters and they that
are sort of disconnected from each other
but before then for the next 100 million
years 100 billion years excuse me
they will interact there will be this
community of all the grabby alien
civilizations and each one of them will
hear about and even meet thousands of
others
and we might hope to join them someday
and become part of that community that's
an interesting thing to aspire to yes
interesting is an interesting word
is the universe of alien civilizations
defined by war
as much or more
than uh
war defined human history
i would say it's defined by competition
and then the question is how much
competition
implies war
so
up until recently competition defined
life on earth
yes
competition between species and
organisms and among humans competitions
among individuals and communities and
that competition often took the form of
war in the last 10 000 years
many people now
are hoping or even expecting to sort of
suppress and end competition in human
affairs
they regulate business competition they
prevent military competition
and
that's a future i think a lot of people
will like
to continue and strengthen people will
like to have something close to world
government or world governance or at
least a world community and they will
like to suppress war and many forms of
business and personal competition over
the coming centuries
and
they may like that so much that they
prevent interstellar colonization which
would become the end of that era that is
interstellar colonization would just
return
severe competition to human or our
descendant affairs and many
civilizations may prefer that and ours
may prefer that but if they choose to
allow interstellar colonization they
will have chosen to allow competition to
return with great force that is there's
really not much of a way to centrally
govern a rapidly expanding sphere of
civilization and so i think the one of
the most
you know solid things we can predict
about gravians is they have accepted
competition
and they have internal competition and
therefore
they have the potential for competition
when they meet each other at the borders
but whether that's military competition
is more of an open question so military
meaning destro physically destructive
right
so there's a lot to say there so one
idea that you kind of proposed
is
progress might be maximized through
competition
through some kind of healthy competition
some definition of healthy so like
constructive not destructive competition
so like we would likely
grabby alien civilizations would be
likely defined by competition because
they can expand faster because they
competition allows
innovation and sort of the battle of
ideas the way i would take the logic is
to say you know competition just happens
if you can't coordinate to stop it
and you probably can't coordinate to
stop it in an expanding interstellar
wave so competition is a
fundamental force
in the universe it has been so far and
it
would be within an expanding grabby
alien civilization but we today have the
chance many people think and hope of
greatly controlling and limiting
competition within our civilization for
a while
and that's an interesting choice
whether to allow competition to reap
to sort of regain its full force
or whether to suppress and manage it
well one of the open questions
that has been raised
in the past
less than 100 years
is whether our desire
to lessen the destructive nature of
competition
or the destructive kind of competition
will be outpaced by the destructive
power of our weapons
sort of uh
if
nuclear weapons and weapons of that kind
become more destructive than our desire
for peace
then it all it takes is one at
the party
to ruin the party it takes one
to make a delay but not that much of a
delay on the cosmological scales we're
talking about so you could even party on
even a vast nuclear war if it happened
here right now on earth
it would not kill all humans
yes
it certainly wouldn't kill all life
and so human civilization would return
within a hundred thousand years
so all
the history of atrocities
and
um if you look at uh
uh the
black plague right
which is
not human cause atrocities or whatever
there are a lot of military
atrocities in history absolutely in the
20th century those are
um
those challenges
to think about human nature but the
cosmic scale of time and space
they do not stop the human spirit
essentially the humanity goes on
through all the atrocities it goes on
like most likely so even a nuclear war
isn't enough to destroy us
or to stop our potential from expanding
but
we could institute a
regime of global governance that limited
competition including military and
business competition of sorts and that
could prevent our expansion
of course
to play devil's advocate
global
governance is centralized power
power corrupts
and absolute power corrupts absolutely
one of the aspects of competition that's
been very productive
is
not letting
any one person any one country any one
center of power become
absolutely powerful
because that's another lesson is it
seems to corrupt there's something about
ego in the human mind that seems to be
corrupted by power so when you say
global governance
that
terrifies me
more than the possibility of war because
it's uh i think that people will be less
terrified than you are right now and let
me try to
paint the picture from their point of
view this isn't my point of view but i
think it's going to be a widely shared
point of view yes this is two devil's
advocates arguing two devils okay
so
for the last half century and into the
continuing future we actually have had
a strong
elite global community that shares a lot
of values and beliefs and has
created a lot of convergence in global
policy
so if you look at electromagnetic
spectrum or
medical experiments or pandemic policy
or
nuclear power energy or regulating
airplanes or just in a wide range of
area in fact the world
has very similar regulations and rules
everywhere and it's not a coincidence
because they are part of a world
community where people get together at
places like davos et cetera where world
elites
want to be respected by other world
elites and they have a you know
convergence of opinion and that produces
something like global governance but
without a global center this is sort of
what human mobs or communities have done
for a long time that is humans can
coordinate together on shared behavior
without a center by having gossip and
reputation within a community of elites
and that is what we have been doing and
are likely to do a lot more of so for
example
you know one of the things that's
happening say with the war in ukraine is
that this world community of elites has
decided that they disapprove of the
russian invasion and they are
coordinating to
pull resources together from all around
the world in order to oppose it and they
are proud of that
sharing that opinion and their and their
feel that they are morally justified in
their stance there and um
that's the kind of event that actually
brings world elite communities together
where they
they come together and they push a
particular policy and position that they
share and that they achieve successes
and
the same sort of passion animates global
elites with respect to say global
warming
or global poverty and other sorts of
things and they are in fact making
progress on those sorts of things
through
shared
global community of elites
and in some sense they are slowly
walking toward global governance slowly
strengthening various world institutions
of governance but cautiously carefully
watching out for the possibility of a
single power that might corrupt it
i think a lot of people over the coming
centuries will look at that history and
like it
it's uh interesting thought
and thank you for playing that devil's
advocate there
but i think
the elites too easily lose touch
of course of the morals
that
uh the best of human nature and power
corrupts sure but everything is their
view is the one that determines what
happens
their view may
still end up there even if you or i
might criticize it from that point of
view so from a perspective of minimizing
human suffering
elites
can use
topics of the war in ukraine
and climate change and all of those
things
to
sell an idea
to the world
and
with disregard to the amount of
suffering it causes their actual actions
so like you can tell all kinds of
narratives that's the way propaganda
works right hitler
uh really sold the idea that everything
germany is doing is either it's the
victim is defending itself against the
cruelty of the world and it's actually
trying to bring out
about a better world
so
every power center thinks they're doing
good
and so this is uh
this is the positive of competition of
not of having multiple power centers
this kind of gathering of elites
makes me very very very nervous
the dinners
the the meetings in the closed rooms
i don't know
i another
but remember we talked about separating
our cold analysis of what's likely or
possible from what we prefer and so
that's this isn't exactly enough time
for that we might say i would recommend
we don't go this route of a world strong
world governance and
uh because i would say it'll preclude
this possibility of becoming grabby
aliens of filling the next nearest
million galaxies for the next billion
years with vast amounts of
activity and interest and value
of life out there that's the thing we
would lose by deciding that we wouldn't
expand that we would stay here and keep
our comfortable
shared governance
so you wait you think that
global
governance
is
makes it more likely or less likely that
we expand out into the universe less
so okay this is the key this is the key
point
right so screw the elites
so right we want to exp wait do we want
to expand
so again i want to separate my neutral
analysis from my evaluation and say
first of all i have an analysis that
tells us this is a key choice that we
will face and that it's a key choice
other aliens have faced out there and it
could be that only one in 10 or 100
civilizations chooses to expand and the
rest of them stay quiet and that's how
it goes out there and we face that
choice too
and
it'll happen sometime in the next 10
million years maybe the next thousand
but the key thing to notice from our
point of view is that
uh even though you might like our global
governance you might like the fact that
we've come together we know we no longer
have massive wars and we no longer have
destructive competition
um and that we could continue that the
cost of continuing that would be to
prevent interstellar colonization that
is once you allow interstellar
colonization then you've lost control of
those colonies and whatever they change
into they could come back here and
compete with you back here as a result
of having lost control and i think if
people value that
global governance and the global
community and regulation and all the
things it can do enough they would then
want to prevent interstellar
colonization i want to have a
conversation with those people i believe
that both for
uh humanity for the good of humanity for
what i believe is good in humanity and
for expansion exploration
um innovation distributing the centers
of power is very beneficial so this
whole meeting of elites and i've met
i've gotten i've been very fortunate to
meet
uh quite a large number of elites
they make me nervous because
it's easy to lose touch of reality
i'm nervous about that in myself
to make sure that you never lose touch
um as you get sort of older
wiser
you know how you generally get like
disrespectful of kids kids these days
no the kids are okay but
here's a stronger case for their
position so i'm going to play the for
the for the elites yes well for the for
the
for the limiting of expansion and for
the regulation of of um behavior so just
okay can i link on that sure so you're
saying those two are connected
so we the human civilization and alien
civilizations come to a uh a crossroads
they have to decide do we want to expand
or not
and connected to that do we want to give
a lot of power to a central elite right
do we want to
uh
distribute the the power centers which
is naturally connected to the expansion
when you expand you distribute the power
if say over the next thousand years we
fill up the solar system right we go out
from earth and we colonize mars and we
change a lot of things
within a solar system still everything
is within reach that is if there's a
rebellious colony around neptune you can
throw rocks at it and smash it and then
teach them discipline okay
a they said that work for the business
central control over the solar system is
feasible
but once you let it escape the solar
system it's no longer feasible but if
you have a solar system that doesn't
have a central control may be broken
into a thousand different political
units in the solar system
then
any one part of that that allows
interstellar colonization and it happens
that is
interstellar colonization happens when
only one party chooses to do it and is
able to do it and that's what it is
therefore so we can just say in a world
of competition
if interstellar colonization is possible
it will happen and then competition will
continue and that will sort of ensure
the continuation of competition into the
indefinite future
that's and competition
we don't know but competition could take
violent forms okay many productive forms
and the case i was going to make is that
i think one of the things that most
scares people about competition is not
just that it creates holocausts and
death on massive scales is that it's
likely to
change who we are and what we value yes
so this is the other thing with power
as we grow
as human civilization grows becomes
multi-planetary
multi-solar system potentially
how does that change us do you think
i think the more you think about it the
more you realize it can change us a lot
so first of all this is pretty dark by
the way well
it's just honest
right so i'm trying to do that but i
think the first thing you should say if
you look at history just human history
over the last ten thousand years
if you really understood what people
were like a long time ago you'd realize
they were really quite different
ancient cultures
created people who were really quite
different most historical fiction lies
to you about that
it often offers you modern characters in
an ancient world but if you actually
study history you will see just how
different they were and how differently
they thought
and that's they've changed a lot many
times and they've changed a lot across
time so i think the most obvious
prediction about the future is
even if that you only have the
mechanisms of change we've seen in the
past you should still expect a lot of
change in the future but we have a lot
bigger mechanisms for change in the
future than we had in the past
so um
i have this book called the age of m
work love and life when robots rule the
earth and it's about what happens if
brain emulations become possible so a
brain emulation is where you take a
actual human brain and you scan it in
fine spatial and chemical detail to
create
a computer simulation of that brain
and then those computer simulations of
brains are basically citizens in a new
world they work and they vote and they
fall in love and they get mad and they
lie to each other and this is a whole
new world and my book is about analyzing
how that world is different than our
world
basically using competition as my key
lever of analysis that is if that world
remains competitive that i can figure
out how they change in that world what
they do differently than we do
and it's very different
and it's different in ways that are
shocking sometimes to many people
in ways some people don't like i think
it's an okay world but i have to admit
it's quite different and that's just
one technology
if we add you know dozens more
technologies changes into the future you
know we should just expect
it's possible to become very different
than who we are i mean in the space of
all possible minds our minds are a
particular architecture a particular
structure a particular set of habits and
they are only you know one piece in a
vast face of possibilities the space of
possible minds is really huge
so
yeah let's linger on the space of
possible minds for a moment
just to sort of humble ourselves
uh
how
peculiar
our peculiarities are like the fact that
we like a particular kind of sex
and the fact that we eat food through
one hole
and poop through another hole
and that seems to be a fundamental
aspect of life
is very important to us
uh and that life is finite in a certain
kind of way we have a meat vehicle
so death is very important to us i
wonder which aspects are fundamental or
would be common
throughout human history and also
throughout sorry throughout history of
life on earth
and
throughout other kinds of lives like
what is
really useful you mentioned competition
seems to be a one fundamental i've tried
to do analysis of
where our distant descendants might go
in terms of what are robust features we
could predict about our descendants is
that so again i have this analysis of
sort of the next generation af so the
next era after ours that if you think of
human history as having three eras so
far right there was the forager error
the farmer and the industry are then my
attempt and age of m is to analyze the
next error after that and it's very
different but of course there could be
more and more errors after that so
you know analyzing a particular scenario
and thinking it through is one way to
try to see how different the future
could be but that doesn't give you some
sort of like sense of what's typical
but i have tried to analyze what's
typical
and so i have two predictions i think i
can make pretty solidly
one thing is that we know at the moment
that humans discount the future rapidly
so uh we discount the future in terms of
caring about consequences roughly a
factor of two per generation and there's
a solid evolutionary analysis why sexual
creatures would do that because
basically your descendants only share
half of your genes and your descendants
your generation away so we only care of
our grandchildren
you know basically that a factor of four
later yeah uh because you know it's
later so this actually explains typical
interest rates in the economy that is
interest rates are greatly influenced by
our discount rates and uh we basically
discount the future by a factor of two
per generation
um
but that's a side effect of the way
our preferences evolved as sexually
selected creatures
we should expect that in the longer run
creatures will evolve who don't discount
the future
they will care about the long run and
they will therefore not neglect the
wrong so for example for things like
global warming or things like you know
that at the moment many commenters are
sad that basically ordinary people don't
seem to care much market prices don't
seem to care a bunch in ordinary people
it doesn't really impact them much
because
humans don't care much about the
long-term future
but
and
futurists find it hard to motivate
people and to engage people about the
long-term future because they just don't
care that much but that's a side effect
of this particular way that our
you know preferences evolved about the
future and so in the future they will
neglect the future less and that's an
interesting thing that will that we can
predict robustly eventually you know
maybe a few centuries maybe longer
eventually our descendants will
care about the future can you speak to
the intuition behind that is it
is it useful to think more about the
future
right if evolution rewards creatures for
having many descendants
then uh if you have decisions that
influence how many descendants you have
then that would be good if you made
those decisions but in order to do that
you'll have to care about them you'll
have to care about that future so to
push back
if that's if you're trying to maximize
the number of descendants but
the nice thing about not caring too much
about the long-term future is you're
more likely to take big risks or you're
you're less risk-averse and it's
possible that
the
both evolution and just life in this in
in the universe is rewarded
rewards the risk takers
well we actually have analysis of the
ideal risk preferences
too so there's a literature on ideal
preferences that evolution should
promote
and for example there's a literature on
competing investment funds and what the
managers of those funds should care
about in terms of risk various kinds of
risks
and in terms of discounting and so
managers of investment funds should
basically have
logarithmic
risk i.e in
collect in shared risk in correlated
risk but be very
risk take risk neutral with respect to
uncorrelated risk so um
that's a feature that's predicted to
happen about individual
personal choices in biology
and also for investment funds so that's
other things that's also something we
can say about the long run what
correlated and uncorrelated
risk if there's something that would
affect all of your descendants
then
if you take that risk you might have
more descendants but you might have zero
and that's just really bad to have zero
descendants but an uncorrelated risk
would be a risk that some of your
descendants would suffer but others
wouldn't and then you have a portfolio
of descendants and so
that portfolio insures you against
problems with any one of them i like the
idea of portfolio descendants and we'll
talk about portfolios with with your
idea of you briefly mentioned will
return there with m e m the age of em
work love and life when robots rule the
earth em by the way is emulated minds so
this
one of the m is short for emulations
i'm short for emulations and it's kind
of an idea of how we might
create artificial minds artificial
copies of minds or
human-like
intelligences i have another dramatic
prediction i can make about long-term
preschools yes which is at the moment we
reproduce as the result of a hodgepodge
of preferences that aren't very well
integrated but sort of in our ancestral
environment induced us to reproduce so
we have preferences over being you know
sleepy and hungry and thirsty and
wanting to have sex and wanting to you
know be excitement et cetera right yeah
and so in our ancestral environment the
packages of preferences that we evolved
to have did induce us to have
more descendants that's why we're here
but
those packages of preferences are not a
robust way to promote having more
descendants they they were tied to our
ancestral environment which is no longer
true so that's one of the reasons we are
now having a big fertility decline
because in our current environment our
ancestral preferences are not inducing
us to have a lot of kids which is from
evolution's point of view a big mistake
we can predict that in the longer run
there will arise creatures who just
abstractly know that what they want is
more descendants
that's that's a very robust way to have
more descendants is to have that as your
direct preference first of all your
thicket is so clear i love it so
mathematical and thank you
for
for thinking so clearly with me and
bearing with my interruptions and
and going on the tangents when we go
there
so you're just clearly saying that
successful long-term
civilizations will prefer to have
descendants
more descendants not just prefer
consciously and abstractly prefer that
is it won't be indirect consequence of
other preferences it will just be the
thing they
know they want there will be a president
in the future that says we must have
more sex
we must have more descendants than do
whatever it takes to do that whatever
we must go to the moon and do the other
things right not because they're easy
but because they're hard but instead of
the moon let's have lots of sex okay but
there's a lot of ways to have
descendants right
right but so that's the whole point when
the world gets more complicated and
there are many possible strategies it's
having that as your abstract preference
that will enforce you to think through
those possibilities and pick the one
that's most effective so just to clarify
descendants
doesn't necessarily mean
the narrow definition of descendants
meaning humans having sex and then
having babies exactly you can have
artificial intelligence systems yes that
uh would in whom you instill
some capability of cognition and perhaps
even consciousness you can also create
their genetics and biology clones of
yourself or um slightly modified clones
thousands of them right um so so all
kinds of descendants it could be exactly
descendants in the space of ideas too
for somehow we no longer exist in this
meat vehicle it's now just like
uh whatever the definition of a life
form is you have descendants of those
life forms
yes and they will be thoughtful about
that they will have thought about what
counts as a descendant and that'll be
important to them to have the right
concept so the they there is very is
very interesting who this they are but
the key thing is we're making
predictions that i think are somewhat
robust about what our distant
descendants will be like another thing i
think you would automatically accept is
they will almost entirely be artificial
and i think that would be the obvious
prediction about any aliens we would
meet that is they would long since have
given up
you know reproducing biologically
well it's all it's like uh organic or
something it's all right it might be
squishy and made out of hydrocarbons but
it would be artificial in the sense of
made in factories with designs on cad
things right factories with scale
economy so the factories we have made on
earth today have much larger scale
economies than the factories in our
cells so the factories in our cells are
there are marvels but they don't achieve
very many scaly times they're tiny
little factories but they're all
factories yes factors on top of
factories so everything uh the the
factors and the factories that are
designed is different than sort of the
factories that have evolved
i think the nature of the word design is
very interesting uh to uncover there but
let me in terms of uh aliens let me
go let me analyze your twitter like it's
shakespeare okay there's a tweet that
says
uh define hello in quotes alien
civilizations as one that might in the
next million years identify humans as
intelligent and civilized travel to
earth and say
hello by making their presence and
advanced abilities known to us the next
15 polls this is a twitter thread the
next 15 polls ask about such hello
aliens and what these polls ask is
your twitter followers what they think
those
aliens would be
like certain particular qualities so uh
poll number one is what percent of hello
aliens evolved from biological species
with two main genders and uh
you know the the popular vote is above
80 percent so most of them have two
genders what do you think about that
i'll ask you about some of these because
it's so interesting it's such an
interesting question it is a fun set of
questions yes like one set of questions
so the genders as we look through
evolutionary history uh what's the
usefulness of that as opposed to having
just one or
like millions
so there's a question in evolution of
life on earth there are very few species
that have more than two genders there
are some but there are they aren't very
many
but there's an enormous number of
species that do have two genders much
more than one
and so there's a literature on
why did multiple genders evolve and
that's sort of what's the point of
having males and females versus
hermaphrodites um so most plants are
mapredice that is they have
there they they would mate male female
but each plant can be either role
and then most animals have chosen to
split into males and females
and then they're differentiating the two
genders and you know there's an
interesting set of questions about why
that happens because you can do
selection
you basically have um
like one gender competes for for the
affection of other and there's sexual
partnership that creates the offspring
so there's sexual selection it's nice to
have
a like a
to a party it's nice to have dance
partners and then you get each one get
to choose based on certain
characteristics and that's an efficient
mechanism for adapting to the
environment being successfully adapted
to the environment
it does look like there's an advantage
in if you have males then the males can
take higher variance and so there can be
stronger selection among the males in
terms of weeding out genetic mutations
because the males have higher variance
in their mating success
sure okay
question number two what percent of
hello aliens evolved from land animals
as opposed to plants or ocean
slash air organisms
by the way i did um recently
see that
there's uh only 10 of species on earth
are in the ocean
so there's a lot more variety on land
there is it's it's interesting so why is
that i don't even i can't even intuit
exactly why that would be maybe survival
on land is harder and so you get a lot
of story that i understand is it's about
small niches so speciation
uh can be promoted by having multiple
different species so in the ocean
species are larger that is there are
more creatures in each species because
the ocean environments don't vary as
much so if you're good in one place
you're good in many other places
but you know on land and especially in
rivers rivers contain an enormous
percentage of the
kinds of species on land
you see because they vary so much
from place to place and so a species can
be good in one place and then other
species can't really compete because
they came from a different place where
things are different so um
it's a remarkable fact actually that
speciation promotes evolution in the
long run that is more evolution has
happened on land because there have been
more species on land because each
species has been smaller
and that's actually a warning about
something or something called rot that
i've thought a lot about which is one of
the problems with even a world
government
which is large systems of software today
just consistently rot and decay with
time and have to be replaced and that
plausibly also is a problem for other
large systems including biological
systems legal systems regulatory systems
and
it seems like large species actually
don't evolve as effectively as small
ones do
and that's an important thing to notice
about that so and that's actually in dif
that's different from ordinary sort of
um
evolution in economies on earth in the
last few centuries say um
you know on earth the more technical
evolution and economic growth happens in
larger integrated cities and nations
but in biology it's the other way around
more evolution happened in the
fragmented species
yeah it's such a nuanced discussion
because you can also push back in terms
of nations and at least companies it's
like large companies seems to evolve
less effectively
there is something
that you know
they have more resources more um
they don't even have better resilience
when you look at the scale of
decades and centuries it seems like a
lot of large companies die
but still large economies do better like
large cities grow better than small
cities large integrated economies like
the united states or the european union
do better than small fragmented ones so
yeah
sure it's it's that that's a very
interesting long discussion but so most
the people and obviously votes on
twitter um
represent the absolute uh objective
truth of things so most but an
interesting question about oceans is
that okay remember i told you about how
most planets would last for trillions of
years yes and then be later right so
people have tried to explain why life
appeared on earth by saying oh all those
planets are going to be unqualified for
life because of various problems that is
they're around smaller stars which last
longer and smaller stars have some
things like more solar flares maybe more
tidal locking
but almost all these problems with
longer-lived planets aren't problems for
ocean worlds
and
a large fraction of planets out there
are ocean worlds so if life can appear
on an ocean world then uh that pretty
much ensures that these
these planets that last a very long time
could have advanced life because most
you know there's a huge fraction of
ocean worlds so that's actually an open
question so when you say
sorry when you say life appear
you're kind of saying life and
intelligent life so like
uh
so that's that's an open question
is land and as i suppose the question
behind
the the twitter
poll which is
a grabby alien civilization that comes
to say hello
what's the chance that they
first began their early steps the
difficult steps they took on on land
what do you think
most 80 percent
uh most people on twitter think it's
very likely right what do you think i
think people are discounting ocean
worlds too much that as i think people
tend to assume that whatever we did must
be the only way it's possible and i
think people aren't giving enough credit
for other possible paths but dolphins
water world by the way people criticize
that movie i love that movie kevin
costner can do me no wrong okay next
question what percent of hello aliens
once had a nuclear war
with greater than 10 nukes fired in
anger so not in incompetence as an
accident
intentional firing of nukes and
less than 20 percent was the most
popular vote it just seems wrong to me
so like
i i wonder what so most people think uh
once you get nukes we're not gonna fire
them they believe
in the power i think they're assuming
that if you had a nuclear war then that
would just end civilization for good i
think that's the thinking that's the
main thing right and i think that's just
wrong i think you could rise again after
a nuclear war it might take ten thousand
years or a hundred thousand years but it
could rise again so what do you think
about mutually sure destruction
as a force to prevent people from firing
nuclear weapons that's a question that's
a new
to a terrifying degree has been raised
now and what's going on well i mean
clearly it has had an effect the
question is just how strong affect for
how long
i mean clearly
we have not gone wild with nuclear war
and clearly the the devastation that you
would get if you initiated nuclear war
is part of the reasons people have been
reluctant to start a war the question is
just how reliably will that ensure the
absence of a war
yeah the night is still young exactly
this has been 70 years or whatever it's
been
uh
i mean but what do you think do you
think we'll see nuclear war in the
yeah in this century
i don't know in this century but that
like it
it's the sort of thing that's likely to
happen eventually
it's a very loose statement okay i
understand now this is where i pull you
out of your mathematical model and ask a
human question
do you think this this particular thing
we've been lucky that it hasn't happened
so far
but what is the nature of nuclear war
let's think about this
there is uh dictators
there's democracies
uh
miscommunication how do wars start world
war one world war ii so so the biggest
datum here is that we've had an enormous
decline in major war over the last
century so that has to be taken into
account now
so the problem is is war is a process
that has a very long tail
that is
there are rare very large wars so the
average war is much worse than the
median war
yes because of this long tail
and that makes it hard to identify
trends over time so the median war has
clearly gone way down in the last
century that a medium rate of war but it
could be that's because
the tail has gotten thicker and in fact
the average war is just as bad but you
know most wars are going to be big force
we so that's the thing we're not so sure
about there's no
strong data
on on um wars with one
because of the destructive nature of the
weapons
kill hundreds of millions of people
there's no data on this
right so but we can start intuiting but
we can see the power law we can do a
power law fit to the rate of wars and
it's a
power law with a thick tail so it's one
of those things that you should expect
most of the damage to be in the few
biggest ones so that's also true for
pandemics and some a few other things
for pandemics most of the damages and
the few biggest ones so the median
pandemic so far is less than the average
that you should expect in the future but
those that fitting of data is very
questionable because uh
yeah well everything you said is correct
the question is like what can we infer
about the future
of civilization
threatening pandemics or
nuclear war
from
studying the history of the 20th century
so like you can't just fit it to the
data the rate of wars and the
destructive nature like that's not
that's not how nuclear war will happen
nuclear war happens with two or
idiots
that have access to a button small wars
happen that way too no i understand that
but that's it's very important small
wars aside it's very important to
understand the dynamics the human
dynamics and the geopolitics of the way
nuclear war happens
in order to predict how we can minimize
the chance of uh
but it is a common and useful
intellectual strategy
to take something that could be really
big or but is often very small and fit
the distribution of the data small
things which you have a lot of them and
then ask do i believe the big things are
really that different right i see so
sometimes it's reasonable to say like
say with tornadoes or even pandemics or
something the underlying process
might not be that different but that's
not possible it might not be
there there is
the fact that mutual short destruction
seems to work to some degree
shows you that to some degree it's
different than the small wars
uh
that that
so it's
it's a really important question to
understand
is are humans capable
one human
like how many humans on earth
if i give them a button now say you
pressing this button will kill everyone
on earth
everyone right how many humans will
press that button
i want to know those numbers
like day to day minute to minute
how many people have that much
irresponsibility evil uh
incompetence
ignorance whatever word you want to
assign there's a lot of dynamics to the
psychology that leads you to press that
button but how many my intuition is the
number
the more destructive the that press of a
button the fewer humans you find and
that number gets very close to zero very
quickly
especially
people have access to such a button but
that's perhaps
uh a hope than a reality and
unfortunately we don't have good data on
this
um
which is like
how destructive are humans willing to be
so i think part of this just has to
think about asking what your time scales
you're looking at right right so if you
say if you look at the history of war
you know we've had a lot of wars pretty
consistently over many centuries
so if i ask if you ask will we have a
nuclear war in the next 50 years i might
say well probably not if i say 500 or 5
000 years like if the same sort of risks
are underlying and they just continue
then you have to add that up over time
and think the risk is getting a lot
larger the longer a time scale we're
looking at but okay let's generalize
nuclear war because what i was more
referring to is something that kills
more than um
of humans on earth
and injures
or makes um
makes the other 80 percent suffer
horribly
uh survive but suffer that's what i was
referring to so when you look at 500
years from now that might not be nuclear
war there might be something else right
that's that kind of has that destructive
effect
and i don't know i it these feels like
these feel like novel
questions
in the history of humanity i just don't
know
i think since nuclear weapons
this has been you know engineering
pandemics for example
uh robotics so nanobots
um
[Music]
here's how i it seems like a real new
possibility that we have to contend with
it we don't have good models or
from from my perspective so if you look
on say the last thousand years or ten
thousand years we could say we've seen a
certain rate at which people are willing
to make big destruction in terms of war
yes okay
and if you're willing to project that
data forward that i think like if you
want to ask over periods of thousands or
tens of thousands of years you would
have a reasonable data set so the key
question is what's changed lately
yes okay and so
a big question of which i've given a lot
of thought to what are the major changes
that seem to have happened in culture
and human attitudes over the last few
centuries and what's our best
explanation for those so that we can
project them forward into the future
and i have a story about that
which is the story that we have been
drifting back toward forager attitudes
in the last few centuries as we get rich
so the idea is we spent a million years
being a forager
and that was a very sort of
standard lifestyle that we know a lot
about
foragers sort of live in small bands
they
make decisions cooperatively they share
food they you know um they don't have
much property et cetera
and humans like that and then 10 000
years ago farming became possible but it
was only possible because we were
plastic enough to really change our
culture farming styles and cultures are
very different they have slavery they
have war they have property they have
inequality they have kings
they they stay in one place instead of
wandering they they don't have as much
diversity of of experience or food they
have more disease this farming life is
just very different but humans were able
to sort of introduce conformity and
religion and all sorts of things to
become just a very different kind of
creature as farmers farmers are just
really different than foragers in terms
of their values and their lives
but the pressures that made foragers
into farmers were part mediated by
poverty
farmers are poor and if they deviated
from the farming norms that every people
around them supported they were quite at
risk of starving to death
um
and then in the last few centuries we've
gotten rich
and as we've gotten rich the social
pressures that turned foragers and
farmers have become less
less persuasive to us
so for example a farming young woman who
was told if you have a child out of
wedlock you and your child may starve
that was a credible threat she would see
actual examples around her to make that
a believable threat
today if you say to a young woman you
shouldn't have a child out of wedlock
she will see other young women around
her doing okay that way we're all rich
enough to be able to afford that sort of
thing and therefore she's more inclined
often to go with her inclinations or
sort of more natural inclinations about
such things rather than to be
pressured to follow the
official farming norms of that you
shouldn't do that sort of thing and all
through our lives we have been drifting
back toward forager attitudes
because we've been getting rich and so
aside from at work which is an exception
but elsewhere i think this explains
trends toward less slavery more
democracy less religion
less fertility more promiscuity
more travel more art more leisure
uh fewer work hours
all these trends are basically explained
by becoming more forager-like and much
science fiction celebrates the star trek
or the culture novels people like this
image that we are moving toward this
world we're basically like foragers
we're peaceful we share we make
decisions collectively we have a lot of
free time
we are into art
so forger
you know forger is a word and it has
it's a loaded word because it's
connected to
the actual
what life was actually like at that time
as you mentioned we sometimes don't do a
good job of telling accurately what life
was like back then but you're saying if
it's not exactly like forge as it rhymes
in some fundamental way right you also
said peaceful
is it obvious that a forger with the
nuclear weapon
uh would
be peaceful i don't know if that's 100
obvious so we know again we know a fair
bit about what foragers lives were like
the main sort of violence they had would
be sexual jealousy they were relatively
promiscuous and so there'd be a lot of
jealousy but they did not have organized
wars with each other that is they were
at peace with their neighboring forager
bands they didn't have property in land
or even in people they didn't really
have marriage
um
and so they were in fact
peaceful
and that's when you think about
large-scale wars they don't start
learning they didn't have coordinated
large-scale wars in the ways chimpanzees
do chimpanzees do have wars between one
tribe of chimpanzees and others but
human foragers did not farmers return to
that of course the more chimpanzee-like
styles well that's a hopeful message if
we could return real quick to uh
to the hello aliens uh twitter thread
one of them is really interesting about
language what percent of hello aliens
would be able to talk to us in our
language this is the question of
communication
it actually gets the nature of language
it also gets to the nature of how
advanced you expect them to be
so
i think some people
see that like we have advanced over the
last thousands of years and we aren't
reaching any sort of limit and so they
tend to assume it could go on forever
and i actually tend to think that within
say 10 million years we will sort of
max out
on technology we'll sort of learn
everything that's feasible to know
for the most part and then you know
obstacles to understanding would more be
about like sort of cultural differences
like ways in which different places had
just chosen to do things differently
and so
then the question is is it even possible
to communicate
across some cultural difference
distances and i might think yeah i could
imagine some maybe advanced aliens who
just become so weird and different from
each other they can't communicate with
each other but
we're probably pretty simple compared to
them
so i would think
sure
if they wanted to they could communicate
with us
so it's the simplicity of the recipient
see i i tend to uh just to push back
let's let's explore the possibility
where that's not the case
can we communicate with ants
i find that um
like this idea that we're not very good
at communicating in general oh you're
saying
all right i see
you're saying once you get orders of
magnitude better at communicating
once they had maxed out on all you know
communication technology in general and
they just understood in general how to
communicate with lots of things and had
done that for millions of years but you
have to be able to this is so
interesting it's somebody who cares a
lot about empathy and imagining how
other people feel
um it's communication requires
empathy meaning
you have to truly understand
how the other person the other
organism sees the world
it's like a
a four-dimensional species talking a
two-dimensional species it's not as
trivial as to me at least
as it might at first seem so let me
reverse my position a little because
i'll say well the whole
hello aliens question really
uh combines two different scenarios that
uh we're slipping over so
one scenario would be that the hello
aliens would be like grabby aliens they
would be just fully advanced they would
have been expanding for millions of
years they would have a very advanced
civilization
and then they would finally be arriving
here you know after a billion years
perhaps of expanding in which case
they're going to be crazy advanced at
some at maximal level but
the holo aliens about aliens we might
meet soon
which might be sort of ufo aliens and
ufo aliens probably are not grabby
aliens
how do you get here if you're not a grab
alien
well they would have to be able to
travel
oh
but so they would not be expansive
so for the road it doesn't count as
grabby so we're talking about expanding
the colony the comfortable colony
so the question is
if ufos some of them are aliens what
kind of aliens would they be
this is sort of the key question you
have to ask in order to try to interpret
that scenario
the key fact we would know is that they
are here right now but the universe
around us is not full of an alien
civilization
so that says right off the bat that they
chose not to
allow
massive expansion of a gravity
civilization is it possible that they're
they chose it but we just don't see them
yet these are the stragglers the
journeymen
so the timing coincidence is it's almost
surely if they are here now they are
much older than us they are many
millions of years older than us
and so
they could have filled the galaxy in
that last millions of years if they had
wanted to
that is isn't it they couldn't just be
right at the edge very unlikely that
most likely they would have been around
waiting for us for a long time they
could have come here anytime in the last
millions of years and they just chosen
they've been waiting around for this or
they just chose to come recently but the
the timing coins it would be crazy
unlikely that they just happened to be
able to get here say in the last hundred
years
uh they would no doubt have been able to
get here far earlier than that again we
don't know so this is reference like ufo
sightings on earth we don't know
if this kind of increase in sightings
have anything to do with action
i'm just talking about like the timing
like they're they're they arose at some
point in space time yes right
and it's very unlikely that that was
just to the point that they could just
barely get here recently almost surely
yeah they would they might they could
have gotten here much earlier
and well throughout the stretch of
several billion years that earth existed
they could have been here often exactly
so
they could have therefore filled the
galaxy long time ago
let's push back on that that's what the
question to me is isn't it possible
that the expansion of a civilization
is much harder than the the travel
the sphere of the reachable is different
than the sphere of the colonized
so
isn't it possible that the sphere of
places where like the stragglers go the
different people that journey out the
explorers is much much larger and grows
much faster
than the civilization
so in which case like they would visit
us there's a lot of visitors the grad
students of the civilization they're
like exploring they're collecting the
data but they're
we're not yet going to see them and by
yet i mean across millions of years
the the time delay between when the
first thing might arrive and then when
colonists could arrive in mass and do a
mass amount of work is cosmologically
short you know in human history of
course sure there might be a century
between that but a century is just a
tiny amount of time
on the scales we're talking about so
this is a in computer science and colony
optimization it's true for ants so it's
like when the first ant shows up it's
likely and if there's anything of value
it's likely the other ants will follow
quickly
yeah relatively short it's also true
that
traveling over very long distances
probably one of the main ways to make
that feasible is that you land somewhere
you colonize a bit you create new
resources and then allow you to go
farther many short hops as opposed to
long exactly
those hops require that you are able to
start a colonization of sorts along
those hops right you have to be able to
stop somewhere make it into a way
station such that you can then support
you moving farther so what do you think
of there's been a lot of ufo sightings
uh what do you think about those ufo
sightings and what do you think if any
of them
are
of extraterrestrial origin and we don't
see
giant civilizations out in the sky
how do you make sense of that then
i want to do some clearing of throats
which people like to do on this topic
right
they want to make sure you understand
they're saying this and not that right
so
i would say the analysis needs both a
prior and a likelihood
so
the prior is what are the scenarios that
are at all plausible
in terms of what we know about the
universe and then the likelihood is the
particular actual sightings like how
hard are those to explain through
various means
i will establish myself as somewhat of
an expert on the prior i would say my
studies and things i've studied make me
an expert and i should stand up and have
an opinion on that and explain be able
to explain it
the likelihood however is not my area of
expertise that is i'm not a you know
pilot i don't do atmospheric studies of
things i haven't studied in detail the
various kinds of atmospheric phenomena
or whatever that might be used to
explain the particular sightings i can
just say from my amateur stance the
sightings look
damn puzzling
they do not look easy to dismiss the
attempts i've seen to easily dismiss
them seem to me to fail it seems like
these are pretty puzzling weird stuff
that deserve an expert's attention so
the in terms of
considering asking what the likelihood
is so analogy i would make is a murder
trial okay
on average if we say what's the chance
any one person murdered another person
as a prior probability maybe one in a
thousand people get murdered maybe each
person has a thousand people around them
who could plausibly have done it so the
prior probability of a murder is one in
a million
but we allow murder trials because often
evidence is sufficient to overcome a one
in a million prior
because the evidence is often strong
enough right
my guess rough guess for the ufos as
aliens scenarios some of them is the
prior is roughly one in a thousand
much higher than the usual murder trial
plenty high enough that strong physical
evidence could put you over the top to
think it's more likely than not
but i'm not an expert on that physical
evidence i'm going to leave that part to
someone else i'm going to say the prior
is pretty high this isn't a crazy
scenario so then i can elaborate on
where my prior comes from what scenario
could make most sense of this data
my scenario to make sense has
two main parts
first is panspermia siblings
so panspermia is the pros hypothesis
process by which life might have arrived
on earth from elsewhere
and a plausible time for that i mean it
would have to happen very early in earth
history because we see life early in his
history and a plausible time could have
been during this stellar nursery where
the sun was born with many other
stars in the same close proximity with
lots of rocks flying around able to move
things from one place to another
pans if a you know rock with life on it
from some rock with planet with life
came into that stellar nursery it
plausibly could have seeded many planets
in that stellar nursery all at the same
time they're all born at the same time
in the same place pretty close to each
other lots of rocks flying around okay
so a panspermia scenario would then
create siblings i.e
there would be say a few thousand
other
planets out there so after the nursery
forms it drifts it separates they drift
apart and so out there in the galaxy
there would now be a bunch of other
stars all formed at the same time and we
can actually spot them in terms of their
spectrum
and they would have um
then started on the same path of life as
we did with that life being seeded but
they would move at different rates
and
most likely most of them would never you
know reach an advanced level before the
deadline but maybe one other did
and maybe it did before us
so
if they did they could know all this and
they could go searching for their
siblings that is they could look in the
sky for the other stars with the mass
the spectrum that matches this the
spectrum that came from this nursery
they could identify their sibling stars
in the galaxy the thousand of them
and those would be of special interest
to them because they would think well
life might be on those
and they could go looking for them can
we just such a brilliant
mathematical philosophical
uh physical biological idea of um
panspermia siblings because we all kind
of started a similar time
in this local pocket
right of the universe
and so
that changes a lot of the math and so
that would create this correlation
between when advanced life might appear
no longer just random independent spaces
in space time there would be this
cluster perhaps and that allows
interaction between
the elements of the cluster yes
non-grabby alien civilizations like
kind of
primitive alien civilizations like us
with others and they might be a little
bit ahead that's so fascinating they
would probably be a lot ahead so the
puzzle is sure sure if if if they you
know they happen before us they probably
happen hundreds of millions of years
before us
but less than a billion less than a
billion but still plenty of time that
they could have become grabby and filled
filled the galaxy and gone and beyond so
there'd be plenty so the the fact is
they chose not to become grabby that
would have to be the interpretation
if we have pants permanently in time to
become grabby you said so yes they
should be playing and they chose not to
are we sure about this so
again a hundred million years is enough
100 million so i told you before that i
said within 10 million years our
descendants will become grabby or not
and they'll have that choice okay right
and so they clearly more than 10 million
years earlier than us so they chose not
to but still go on vacation look around
so it's not grabby if they chose not to
expand that part that's going to have to
be a rule they set to not allow any part
of themselves to do it like
if they let any little ship fly away
with the ability to create a colony
the game's over then they have prevented
then the world the universe becomes
grabby from their origin with this one
colony right so in order to prevent
their civilization being grabby they
have to have a rule they enforce pretty
strongly that no part of them can ever
try to do that through
a global authoritarian regime or
through something that's internal to
that meaning it's part of the
nature of life
that it doesn't want as like an advanced
political officer in the brain or
whatever
yes there's something in
human nature
that prevents you from what or like like
alien nature right that as you get more
advanced you become lazier and lazier in
terms of exploration and expansion
so i would say they would have to have
enforced a rule against expanding and
that rule would probably make them
reluctant to let people leave very far
that you know any one vacation trip far
away could risk an expansion from the
six vacation trip so they would probably
have a pretty tight lid on just allowing
any travel out from their origin in
order to enforce this rule
but then we also know well they would
have chosen to come here so clearly they
made an exception from their general
rule to say okay but an expedition to
earth that should be allowed it could be
intentional exception or
incompetent exception but if incompetent
then they couldn't maintain this over
100 million years this policy of not
allowing any expansion so we have to see
they have successfully they not just had
a policy to try they succeeded over 100
million years in preventing the
expansion
that's a substantial competence let me
think about this so you don't think
there could be a barrier in 100 million
years you don't think there could be a
barrier
to
like technological barrier
to becoming
expansionary
imagine the europeans that tried to
prevent anybody from leaving europe to
go to the new world and imagine how what
it would have taken to make that happen
over 100 million years
yeah it's impossible they would had to
have very strict you know guards at the
borders
saying no you can't go well but just
just to clarify
you're not suggesting that's actually
possible
i am suggesting it's possible i i don't
know how you keep my silly human brain
maybe it's a brain that values freedom
but i don't know how you can keep
no matter how much force
no matter how much censorship or control
or so on i just don't uh know how you
can keep people from
exploring into the mysterious into the
end you're thinking of people we're
talking aliens so remember there's a
vast space of different possible social
creatures they could have evolved from
different cultures they could be in
different kinds of threats i mean there
are many things as you talked about that
most of us would feel very reluctant to
do yes this isn't one of those but okay
so how if the ufo sightings represent
alien visitors how the heck are they
getting here under the transparent
siblings so panspermia siblings is one
part of the scenario which is that's
where they came from and from that we
can conclude they had this rule against
expansion and they've successfully
enforced that
that also creates a plausible agenda for
why they would be here that is to
enforce that rule on us that is if we go
out and expanding then we have defeated
the purpose of this rule they set up
interesting right so they would be here
to convince us to not expand convincing
quotes right through various mechanisms
so obviously one thing we conclude is
they didn't just destroy us that would
have been completely possible right so
the fact that they're here and we are
not destroyed means that they chose not
to destroy us they have some degree of
empathy or you know whatever their
morals are that would make them
reluctant to just destroy us they would
rather persuade us
for their brethren and so they may have
been there's a difference between
arrival and observation they may have
been observing for a very long time
exactly and they arrive to try to
not to try
i don't think to ensure try to ensure
that we don't become grabby
which is because that's we can see they
they did not they must have been forced
to rule against that and they are
therefore
here to that's a plausible
interpretation why they would risk this
expedition when they clearly don't risk
very many expeditions over this long
period to allow this one exception
because otherwise if they don't we may
become grabby and they could have just
destroyed us but they didn't and they're
closely monitoring the technological
advancing of civilization like what
nuclear weapons is one thing's like all
right cool
that might have less to do with nuclear
weapons and more with nuclear energy
maybe they're monitoring fusion closely
like
how clever are these apes so no doubt
they have a button that if we get too
uppity or risky they can push the button
and ensure
that we don't expand but they'd rather
do it some other way so now
that's that explains why they're here
and why they aren't out there there's
another thing that we need to explain
there's another key data we need to
explain about ufos if we're going to
have a hypothesis that explains them and
this is something many people have
noticed which is
they they had two two extreme options
they could have chosen and didn't chose
they could have either just remained
completely invisible clearly an advanced
civilization could have been completely
invisible there's no reason they need to
fly around and be noticed they could
just be in orbit and in dark satellites
that are completely invisible to us
watching whatever they want to watch
that would be
well within their abilities that's one
thing they could have done the other
thing they could do is just show up and
you know land on the white house lawn as
they say and shake hands like make
themselves really obvious
they could have done either of those
and they didn't do either of those
that's the next thing you need to
explain about ufos azaleas why would
they take this intermediate approach
hanging out near the edge of visibility
with somewhat impressive mechanisms but
not walking up and introducing
themselves nor just being completely
invisible so okay a lot of questions
there so one so one do you think it's
obvious where the white house is
or the white house law obvious where
there are concentrations of humans that
you could go up and into but it's human
it's the most interesting thing
yeah about earth yeah
are you sure about this because
if they're worried about an you know an
expansion then it would be worried about
a civilization that we could be capable
of can pension obviously humans are the
civilization on earth that's
by far the closest to being able to
expand i just don't know if aliens
obviously see
obviously see humans like the individual
humans like the organ of the the meat
vehicles as the center of focus for
observing
a life on a planet they're supposed to
be really smart and advanced like this
shouldn't be that hard for that but
i think we're actually the dumb ones
because we think humans are the
important things but it could be
our ideas it could be something about
our technologies mediated with us that's
correlated with it now we make it
seem like it's mediated
by us humans but the focus for alien
civilizations might be
the ai systems or the technologies
themselves that might be the organism
like what humans are like uh
okay human is the food
the the source of the organism that's
under observation
versus like so like the what they wanted
to have close contact with was something
that was closely near humans then they
would be contacting those and we would
just incidentally see but we would still
see but don't you think they is isn't it
possible
taking their perspective
isn't it possible that they would want
to interact with some fundamental aspect
that they're interested in
without interfering with it
and and that's actually a very no matter
how fast you are it's very difficult to
do but that's puzzling so i mean the you
know the prototypical ufo observation
is a
shiny
big
object in the sky that has very rapid
acceleration and
no apparent you know surfaces for
using air to to manipulate at speed
um
you know and
the question is why that right again if
if they just for example if they just
wanted to talk to our computer systems
they could like move some sort of like a
little probe that like connects to a
wire and like reads the
reads and sends bits there they don't
need a shiny thing flying in the sky
but i don't you think they would be
there they are would be looking for the
right way to communicate the right
language to communicate everything you
just said
looking at the computer systems i mean
that's not a trivial thing
coming up with a signal that us humans
would not freak out too much about but
also understand might not be that
trivial
freak out apart is an another
interesting constraint so again i said
like the two obvious strategies are just
to remain completely invisible and watch
which would be quite feasible or to just
directly interact let's come out and be
really very direct right i mean there's
big things that you can see around
there's big cities there's aircraft
carriers there's there's lots of if you
want to just find a big thing and come
right up to it and like tap it on the
shoulder or whatever that would be quite
feasible and they're not doing that so
my hypothesis is that
one of the other questions there was do
they have a status hierarchy and might i
think most animals on earth who are
social animals have status hierarchy
and they would reasonably presume that
we have a status hierarchy
and take me to your leader well i would
say their strategy is to be impressive
and sort of get us to see them at the
top of our status hierarchy just to just
to
you know
that's how for example we domesticate
dogs right we convince dogs we're the
leader of their pack
right and we domesticate many animals
that way but as we we just swap into the
top of their status hierarchy and we say
we're your top status animals so you
should do what we say you should follow
our lead
so
the idea that would be
they are going to get us to do what they
want by
being
top status
you know all through history kings and
emperors etcetera have tried to impress
their citizens and other people by
having the bigger palace the bigger
parade the bigger crown and diamonds
right whatever maybe building a bigger
pyramid et cetera just it's a very well
established trend to just be high status
by being more impressive than the rest
to push back when there's an order of uh
several orders of magnitude of power
differential asymmetry of power i feel
like that status hierarchy no longer
applies it's like memetic theory it's
like most emperors are several orders of
magnitude more powerful than anyone okay
a member of their empire uh let's
increase
that by even more so like if i'm
interacting with ants
right
i no longer feel like i need to
establish my power with ants i actually
want to lessen
i i want to lower myself to the ants i
want to become the lowest possible and
so that they would welcome me
so i'm less concerned about them
worshipping me i'm more concerned about
them welcoming me into it it is
important that you be non-threatening
and that you be local so i think for
example if the aliens had done something
really big in the sky you know 100 light
years away
that would be there not here yes and
that could seem threatening so i think
their strategy to be the high status
would have to be to be visible but be
here and non-threatening i just don't
know if it's obvious how to do that
like take your own perspective if you
see a planet
with
with relatively intelligent like complex
structures being formed like uh
yeah life forms you could see this
under in titan or something like that
the moon you know right europa
you start to see not just primitive
bacterial life but multicellular life
and it seems to form some very
complicated cellular uh colonies
structures that they're they're dynamic
there's a lot of stuff going on some
some giant gigantic cellular automata
type of construct
how do you make yourself
known to them
in an impressive fashion
without destroying it
like we know how to destroy potentially
right so
so if you go touch stuff you're likely
to hurt it right there's a good risk of
hurting something by touch getting too
close and touching it and interacting
right yeah like landing on a white house
lawn right so the claim is
that their current strategy of hanging
out at the periphery of our vision and
just being very clearly physically
impressive with very clear physically
impressive abilities
is
at least a plausible strategy they might
use to impress us and convince us sort
of we're at the top of their status
hierarchy
and i would say if they if they came
closer not only would they risk hurting
us in ways that they couldn't really
understand but more plausibly they would
reveal things about themselves we would
hate so if you look at
how we treat other civilizations on
earth and other people
we are generally you know
interested in foreigners and people from
other plant lands and we were generally
interested in their varying cult customs
et cetera until we find out that they do
something that violates our moral norms
and then we hate them
and these are aliens for god's sakes
right
there's just going to be something about
them that we hate they eat babies who
knows what it is but something they
don't think is offensive but that they
think we might find and so they they
would be risking a lot by revealing a
lot about themselves we would find
something we hated
interesting but do you uh resonate at
all with
memetic theory where like we only feel
this way about things that are very
close to us so aliens are sufficiently
different to where we'll be like
fascinated terrified or fascinated but
not like right but if they want to be at
the top of our status hierarchy to get
us to follow them they can't be too
distant they have to be close enough
that we would see them that way but
pretend to be close enough right right
and not reveal much that mystery that
old clintus would right cowboy
let me see
we're clever enough that we can figure
out their agenda that is just from the
fact that we're here if we see that
they're here we can figure out oh they
want us not to expand and look they are
this huge power and they're very
impressive so and a lot of us don't want
to expand so that could easily tip us
over the edge toward
we we already wanted to not expand we
already wanted to be able to regulate
and have a central community and here
are these very advanced smart aliens who
have
survived for 100 million years and
they're telling us not to expand either
this is brilliant
i love this so much uh the the so
returning to panspermia siblings just to
clarify one thing
in that
framework
how would who
originated who planted it would it be a
grabby alien civilization that planted
the siblings or no the simple scenario
is that life started on some
other planet billions of years ago yes
and it went through part of the stages
of evolution to advance life but not all
the way to advanced life
and then some rock hit it grabbed a
piece of it on the rock and that rock
drifted for maybe in a million years
until it happened upon the stellar
nursery where it then seeded many stars
and something about that life
without being super advanced it was
nevertheless resilient to the harsh
conditions of space
there's some graphs that i've been
impressed by that show sort of the level
of genetic information in various kinds
of life on the history of earth
and basically
we are now more complex than the earlier
life but the earlier life was still
pretty damn complex
and so if you actually you know project
this log graph in history it looks like
it was many billions of years ago when
you get down to zero so like plausibly
you could say there was just a lot of
evolution that had to happen before you
to get to the simplest life we've ever
seen in history of life on earth was
still pretty damn complicated
okay and so that race that's always been
this puzzle how could life get to this
enormously complicated level in the
short period it seems to
at the beginning of earth history so
where you know it's only 300 million
years at most it appeared and then it
was really complicated at that point so
panspermia allows you to explain that
complexity by saying well it spent
another five billion years on another
planet
going through lots of earlier stages
where it was working its way up to the
level of complexity you see at the
beginning of earth
we'll try to talk about other ideas of
the origin of life but let me
return to ufo sightings is there other
explanations that are possible outside
of panspermia siblings that can explain
no grabby aliens in the sky
and yet
alien arrival on earth
well the other categories of
explanations that most people will use
is well first of all just mistakes like
you know you're you're confusing
something ordinary for something
mysterious right
or
some sort of secret organization like
our government is secretly messing with
us and trying to do a you know a false
flag up or whatever right you know
they're trying to convince the russians
or the chinese that there might be
aliens and scare them into not attacking
or something right
because if you you know the history of
world war ii say the u.s government did
all these big fake operations
where they were faking a lot of big
things in order to mess with people so
that's a possibility the government's
been lying and you know faking things
and
paying people to lie about what they saw
etc that that's a plausible set of
explanations for
the range of sightings seen
and another explanation people offers
some other hidden organization on earth
there's some you know secret
organization somewhere that has much
more advanced capabilities than
anybody's given it credit for for some
reason it's been keeping secret i mean
they all sound somewhat implausible but
again we're looking for maybe you know
one in a thousand sort of priors
the question is you know
could could they be in that level of
plausibility can we just linger on this
so you first of all you've written
talked about thought about
so many different topics you're an
incredible mind
and i
just thank you for sitting down today
i'm almost like at a loss of which place
we explore but let me on this topic
ask about conspiracy theories because
you've written about institutions on
authorities
what um this is a bit of a therapy
session but uh
what do we make of conspiracy theories
the phrase itself is
pushing you in a direction right so so
clearly in history there we've had many
large coordinated keepings of secrets
right say the manhattan project right
and there was a lot of hundreds of
thousands of people working on that
over many years but they they kept it a
secret right clearly many large military
operations have kept things secrets over
you know even decades
with many thousands of people involved
so clearly it's possible to keep
something secret over time periods
um
you know but the more people you involve
and the more time you're assuming and
the more the less centralized an
organization or the less discipline they
have the harder it gets to believe but
we're just trying to calibrate basically
in our minds
which kind of secrets can be kept by
which groups over what time periods for
what purposes right but let me uh i
don't have enough data
so i'm somebody
i you know i hang out with people and i
love people i love all things really and
i just
i think that most people even the
have the capacity to be good
and they're beautiful and i enjoy them
so the kind of data my brain whatever
the chemistry of my brain is that sees
the beautiful and things
is maybe collecting a subset of data
that doesn't allow me to intuit
the competence
that humans are able to uh to uh
achieve
in uh constructing a conspiracy theory
so for example one one thing that people
often talk about is like intelligence
agencies this like broad thing they say
the cia the fsb the different the
british intelligence i've uh fortunate
or unfortunate enough never gotten the
chance that i know of to talk to any
member of those intelligence agencies
uh nor
like
uh take a peek behind the curtain or the
first curtain i don't know how many
levels of curtains there are and so i
don't i can't intuit my interactions
with government i uh was funded by dod
and darpa and i've interacted uh been to
the pentagon
like
with all due respect
to my friends lovely friends in
government and there are a lot of
incredible people but there is a very
giant bureaucracy that sometimes
suffocates the ingenuity of the human
spirit is one way i can put it meaning
they are i just it's difficult for me to
imagine extreme competence at a scale
of hundreds or thousands of human beings
now that doesn't mean that's my very
anecdotal data of the situation and so i
try to build up my intuition
about
centralized system of government
how much conspiracy is possible how much
the intelligence agencies or some other
source can
generate sufficiently robust propaganda
that controls the populace if you look
at world war ii as you mentioned there
have been extremely powerful propaganda
machines on nazi on the side of nazi
germany on the side of the soviet union
on the side of the united states and all
these different
uh
mechanisms sometimes they control the
free press
through social pressures sometimes they
control the press
through the threat of violence you know
as you do in authoritarian regimes
sometimes it's like deliberately the
dictator like writing the news
the headlines and literally announcing
it and uh something about
human psychology forces you
to uh
to embrace the narrative and believe the
narrative and at scale that becomes
reality when the initial spark
was just a propaganda thought in a
single individual's mind so i don't i
can't necessarily intuit
of what's possible but i'm
skeptical
of the power of human institutions to
construct
uh conspiracy theories that cause
suffering at scale especially in this
modern age when information is becoming
more and more accessible by the populace
anyway that's
i don't know if you can
uh suffer at scale but of course say
during wartime the people who are
managing the various conspiracies like
d-day or manhattan projects they thought
that their conspiracy was
avoiding harm rather than causing harm
so if you can get a lot of people to
think that supporting the comparison
conspiracy is
helpful then a lot more might do that
and there's just a lot of things that
people just don't want to see
so if you can make your conspiracy the
sort of thing that people wouldn't want
to talk about anyway even if they knew
about it
you're you know most of the way there so
i have learned many over the years many
things that most ordinary people should
be interested in but somehow don't know
even though the data has been very
widespread so you know i have this book
the elephant in the brain and one of the
chapters is there on medicine and
basically
most people seem ignorant of the very
basic fact that when we do randomized
trials where we give some people more
medicine than others
the people who get more medicine are not
healthier
just overall in general just like
induce somebody to get more medicine
because you just give them more budget
to buy medicine say
not not a specific medicine just the
whole category
and you would think that would be
something most people should know about
medicine you might even think that would
be a conspiracy theory
to think that would be hidden but in
fact most people never learn that fact
so just to clarify
just a general high level statement the
more medicine you take the less healthy
you are
randomized experiments don't find that
fact
do not find that more medicine makes you
more healthy yeah they're just no
connection
oh in randomized experiments there's no
relationship between more medicine so
it's not a negative relationship but
it's just no relationship right
and uh so the the
the conspiracy theory is b would say
that the businesses that sell you
medicine don't want you to know that
fact and then you're saying that there's
also part of this
is that people just don't want to know
they just don't want to know and so they
don't learn this so you know i've lived
in the washington area for several
decades now reading the washington post
regularly every week there was a special
you know
section on health and medicine it never
was mentioned in that section of the
paper in all the 20 years i read that
so do you think there is some truth to
this caricatured blue pill red pill
where most people don't want to know the
truth no there are many things about
which people don't want to know certain
kinds of truths
yeah that is bad looking truths truths
that
discouraging truths that sort of take
away the justification for things they
feel passionate about
do you think that's
a bad aspect of human nature that's
something we should try to overcome
um well as we discussed my first
priority is to just tell people about it
to do the analysis and the cold facts of
what's actually happening and then to
try to be careful about how we can
improve so our book the elephant in the
brain co-authored with kevin simler is
about how we hidden motives in everyday
life
and our first priority there is just to
explain to you what are the things that
you are not looking at that you have
reluctant to look at
and many people try to take that book as
a self-help book where they're trying to
improve themselves and and make sure
they look at more things and that often
goes badly because it's harder to
actually do that than you think
yeah and so but we at least want you to
know that that this truth is available
if you want to learn about it it's the
nietzsche if you gaze long to the abyss
the abyss gazes into you let's talk
about this elephant in the brain
uh amazing book
the elephant in the room
is quote an important issue that people
are reluctant to acknowledge or address
a social taboo the elephant in the brain
is an important but unacknowledged
feature of how our mind works
and introspective taboo
you describe
selfishness and self-deception
as uh
the core or some of the core elephants
some of the elephants elephant offspring
in the brain
selfishness and self-deception
all right
can you explain can you explain why
these are um the taboos in our brain
that we
uh
don't want to acknowledge your conscious
mind the one that's listening to me that
i'm talking to at the moment allegedly
you like to think of yourself as the
president or king of your mind
ruling over all that you see issuing
commands that immediately obeyed yes
you are instead better understood as the
press secretary of your brain
you don't make decisions you justify
them to an audience
that's what your conscious mind is for
you watch what you're doing
and you try to come up with stories that
explain what you're doing so that you
can avoid accusations of violating norms
so
humans compared to most other animals
have norms and this allows us to manage
larger groups with our morals and norms
about what we should or shouldn't be
doing this is so important to us that we
needed to be constantly watching what we
were doing in order to make sure we had
a good story to avoid norm violation so
many norms are about motives so if i hit
you on purpose that's a big violation of
hit you accidentally that's okay
i need to be able to explain why it was
an accident and not on purpose
so where's that need come from for your
own self-preservation right so humans
have norms and we have the norm that if
we see anybody violating a norm we need
to tell other people and then coordinate
to to just make them stop and punish
them for for violating so
such benefits are strong enough and
severe enough that we each want to avoid
being successfully accused of violating
norms
so for example hitting someone on
purpose is a big clear norm violation if
we do it consistently we may be thrown
out of the group and that would mean we
would die that's right okay so we need
to be able to convince people we are not
going around hitting people on purpose
if somebody happens to be at the other
end of our fist and their face connects
that was an accident and we need to be
able to explain that
and similarly for many other norms
humans have uh we are serious about
these norms and we don't want people to
violate them we find them violating
we're going to accuse them but many
norms have a motive component and so we
are trying to explain ourselves and make
sure we have a good motive story about
everything we do
which is why we're constantly
trying to explain what we're doing and
that's what your conscious mind is doing
it is trying to make sure you've got a
good motive story for everything you're
doing and that's why you don't know why
you really do things what you know is
what the good story is about why you've
been doing things and that's the
self-deception and you're saying that
there's a machine the actual dictator is
selfish
and then you're just the press secretary
who's desperately doesn't want to get
fired and it's justifying all of all the
decisions of the dictator and that's the
self-deception
right now most people actually are
willing to believe that this is true in
the abstract so our book has been
classified as psychology and it was
reviewed by psychologists and the basic
way that psychology referees and
reviewers responded to say this is well
known
most people accept that there's a fair
bit of self-deception but they don't
want to accept it about themselves
directly they don't want to accept it
about the particular topics that we talk
about so people accept the idea in the
abstract that they might be
self-deceived or that they might not be
honest about various things
but that hasn't penetrated into the
literatures where people are explaining
particular things like why we go to
school why we go to the doctor why we
vote etc so our book is mainly about ten
areas of life and explaining about in
each area what our actual motives there
are
and you know people who study those
things have not admitted that hidden
motives are explaining those particular
areas they haven't taken the leap from
theoretical psychology to actual public
policy exactly and economics and all
that kind of stuff let me just linger on
this
uh and uh
bring up my
old friends
zingman freud and carl young so how vast
is this
landscape of the unconscious mind the
power and the scope of the dictator
is uh is it only dark there
is it uh some light is there some love
the vast majority of what's happening in
your head you are unaware of so in a
literal sense the
unconscious the
aspects of your mind that you're not
conscious of is the overwhelming
majority but but that's just true in a
literal engineering sense your mind is
doing lots of low-level things and you
just can't be consciously aware of all
that low-level stuff but there's plenty
of room there for lots of things you're
not aware of
but can we try to shine a light at the
things we're unaware of
specifically now again staying with the
philosophical psychology side for a
moment you know can you shine the light
in the jungian shadow can you
what what's going on there what is this
machine like like what
what level of thoughts are happening
there is it uh something that could we
can even interpret if we somehow could
visualize it is it something that's
human interpretable or is it just a kind
of chaos of
like monitoring different systems in the
body making sure you're
happy making sure you're um fed all
those kind of basic forces that form
abstractions on top of each other and
they're not introspective at all we
humans are social creatures plausibly
being social is the main reason we have
these unusually large brains therefore
most of our brain is devoted to being
social and so the things we're very
obsessed with and constantly paying
attention to are
how do i look to others
what would others think of me if they
knew these various things they might
learn about me so that's close to being
fundamental to what it means to be human
is caring what others think right to to
be
trying to present a story that would be
okay for what other things but we're
very constantly thinking what do other
people think so let me ask you this
question then about you robin hansen who
many places
sometimes for fun sometimes as a basic
statement of principle
likes to disagree with with
what the majority of people think
so how do you explain um
how are you self-deceiving yourself in
this task
and how are you being self how's your
like why is the dictator manipulating
you inside your head to be so critical
like there's norms why do you want to
stand out
in this way why do you want to challenge
the norms in this way almost by
definition i can't tell you what i'm
deceiving myself about
but the more practical strategy that's
quite feasible is to ask about what are
typical things that most people decease
themselves about and then to own up to
those particular things sure what's what
what's a good one so for example
i can very much acknowledge that i would
like to be well thought of
yes that i would be seeking uh attention
and glory and uh praise yes from my
intellectual work and that that would be
a major agenda driving my
intellectual attempts
so you know if there were topics that
other people would find less interesting
i might be less interested in those for
that reason for example i might want to
find topics whether people are
interested and i might want to
go for the glory of finding a big
insight rather than a small one
and maybe one that was especially
surprising
that's also of course consistent with
some more ideal concept of what an
intellectual should be
but most intellectuals are relatively
risk-averse they are
in some local intellectual tradition and
they are adding to that and they are
staying conforming to the sort of usual
assumptions and usual accepted beliefs
and practices of a particular area
so that they can be accepted in that
area and you know treat it as part of
the community
um
but you might think
for the purpose of the larger
intellectual project of understanding
the world better
people should be less eager to just add
a little bit to some tradition and they
should be looking for what's neglected
between the major traditions and major
questions they should be looking for
assumptions maybe we're making that are
wrong they should be looking at ways
things that are very surprising like
things that would be
you would have thought a priori unlikely
that once you are convinced of it you
find that to be very important and
and a big update right so
um
you could say that um
one motivation i might have is less
motivated to be sort of comfortably
accepted into some particular
intellectual community and more willing
to just go for these
more fundamental
long shots that should be
very important if you could find them
which would if so if you can find them
would get you
appreciated uh respect
across a larger number of people across
the longer time span of history right so
like maybe the the small local community
will say you suck
right you must conform but the larger
community will see the brilliance of you
breaking out of the cage of the small
conformity into a larger cage
it's always a bigger there's always a
bigger page and then you'll be
remembered by more yeah um also that
explains your choice of colorful shirt
that looks great in a black background
so you definitely
stand out right are now of course you
know you could say well you could get
all this attention by making false
claims
of dramatic improvement sure and then
wouldn't that be much easier than
actually working through all the details
why not to make true claims let me ask
the press secretary why not
why
so of course you spoke several times
about how much you value truth and the
pursuit of truth
that's a very nice narrative right
hitler and stalin also talked about the
value of truth do you
worry when you introspect as
broadly as all humans might that it
becomes a drug
this uh
being a martyr
point being the person who points out
that the emperor wears no clothes
even when the emperor is obviously
dressed
just to be the person who points out
that the emperor is wearing no clothes
do you think about that
so
i think the standards you hold yourself
to
are dependent on the audience you have
in mind
so if you think of your audience as
relatively easily fooled
or relatively gullible
then you won't bother to generate more
complicated deep
you know
arguments and structures and evidence to
persuade somebody who has higher
standards because why bother
you you can get away with something much
easier and of course if you are say a
salesperson uh you know you make money
on sales then
you don't need to convince the top few
percent of the most sharp customers you
can just go for the
bottom 60 of the most gullible customers
and make plenty of sales right
so i think um intellectuals have to vary
one of the main ways intellectuals
varies in who is their audience in their
mind who are they trying to impress
is it the people down the hall is it the
people who are reading their twitter
feed is it their parents is it their
high school teacher
right
or is it einstein and freud
and socrates right
so i think
those of us who are especially arrogant
especially
think that we're really big shot or have
a chance at being a really big shot we
were naturally going to pick the
big shot audience that we can we're
going to be in trying to impress
socrates in einstein is that why you
hang out with tyler conan and try sure i
mean try to
and you might think you know from the
point of view of just making money or
having sex or other sorts of things this
is misdirected energy
right right trying to impress the very
most
highest quality minds that's such a
small sample and they can't do that much
for you anyway yeah so i might well have
had more you know ordinary success in
life be more popular invited to more
priorities make more money if i had
targeted a
lower
set tier
intellectuals with the standards they
have
but for some reason i decided early on
that einstein was my audience or people
like him
and i was going to impress them
yeah i mean you you pick your set of
motivations uh you know convincing and
pressing tyler cohen is not gonna help
you get laid trust me i tried
all right uh
what are some notable
um
sort of effects of the elephant in the
brain in everyday life so you mentioned
when we try to apply that to economics
to public policy so when we think about
medicine education all those kinds of
things so what are some things that well
the key thing is medicine is much less
useful health-wise than you think
so you know if you're focused on your
health you would
care a lot less about it and if you were
focused on other people's health you
would also care a lot less about it but
if medicine is as we suggest more about
showing that you care and let other
people showing that they care about you
then
a lot of priority on medicine can make
sense so that was our very earliest
discussion in the podcast you were
talking about what do you know should
you give people a lot of medicine when
it's not very effective and then the
answer then is well if that's the way
that you show that you care about them
and you really want them to know you
care
then maybe that's what you need to do if
you can't find a cheaper more effective
substitute so if we actually just pause
on that for a little bit
how do we start
to untangle the full set of
self-deception happening in the space of
medicine
so we have a method that we use in our
book that is what i recommend for people
to use and all these sorts of topics the
straightforward method is first don't
look at yourself
look at other people
look at broad patterns of behavior in
other people and then ask
what are the various theories we could
have to explain these patterns of
behavior and then just do the simple
matching which theory better matches the
behavior they have
and the last step is to assume that's
true of youtube
don't assume you're an exception it may
if you happen to be an exception that
won't go so well but nevertheless on
average you aren't very well positioned
to judge if you're an exception so
look at what other people do explain
what other people do and assume that's
youtube but also in the case of medicine
there's several
parties to consider so there's the
individual person that's receiving the
medicine there's the doctors that are
prescribing the medicine
there's
drug companies that are selling drugs
there are governments that have
regulations that are lobbyists so you
can build up a network of
categories of humans in this
and they each play their role
so how do you
introspect
the
sort of analyze the system at a system
scale versus at the individual scale
so it turns out that in general it's
usually much easier to explain producer
behavior than consumer behavior that is
the drug companies or the doctors have
relatively clear incentives to give the
customers whatever they want yeah and
similarly say governments and democratic
countries have the incentive to give the
voters what they want so
that focuses your attention on the
patient and the voter
in this equation and saying what do they
want they would be driving the rest of
the system
whatever they want the other parties are
willing to give them
in order to get paid
so now we're looking for puzzles in
patient and voter behavior what are they
choosing and why do they choose that
and how much exactly and then we can
explain that potentially again returning
to the producer by the producer being
incentivized to manipulate the
decision-making processes of the voter
and the consumer now in almost every
industry producers are in general happy
to lie
and exaggerate in order to get more
customers yeah this is true of auto
repair as much as human body repair and
medicine
so the differences between these
industries can't be explained by the
willingness of the producers to give
customers what they want or to do
various things that we have to again
go to the customers why are customers
treating body repair different than auto
repair
yeah and that potentially requires a lot
a lot of thinking a lot of data
collection and potentially looking at
historical data too because things don't
just happen overnight that over time
there's principle it does but actually
it's a lot actually easier than you
might think
i think the biggest limitation is just
the willingness to consider alternative
hypotheses so many of the patterns that
you need to rely on are actually pretty
obvious simple patterns you just have to
notice them and ask yourself how can i
explain those
often you don't need to look at the most
subtle most you know difficult
statistical evidence that might be out
there the simplest patterns are often
enough
all right so there there's a fundamental
statement about self-deception in the
book there's the application of that
like we just did in medicine
can you steal man
the argument that uh many of the
foundational ideas in the book are wrong
meaning
uh
there's two that you just made which is
it can be a lot simpler than it looks
can you steal man in the case that it's
case by case it's going it's always
super complicated like it's a complex
system it's very difficult to have a
simple model about it's very difficult
to disrespect and the other one is that
the human brain isn't
not just about self-deception
um that that there's a lot of
there's a lot of motivation to play and
we are able to really introspect our own
mind and like what what's on the surface
of the conscious is actually quite a
good representation of what's going on
in the brain and you're not deceiving
yourself you're able to actually arrive
to deeply think about where your mind
stands and what you think about the
world and it's less about impressing
people and more about being a
free-thinking individual
so
when a child
tries to explain why they don't have
their homework assignment yes they are
sometimes inclined to say the dog ate my
homework they almost never say the
dragon ate my homework
the reason is the dragon is a completely
implausible explanation
almost always when we make excuses for
things we choose things that are at
least in some degree plausible it could
perhaps have happened
that's an obstacle
for any explanation of a hidden motive
or a hidden feature of human behavior if
people are pretending one thing while
really doing another they're usually
going to pick as a pretense something
that's somewhat plausible
that's going to be an obstacle to
proving that hypothesis
if you are focused on sort of the local
data that a person would typically have
if they were challenged so if you're
just looking at one kid and his lack of
homework yeah
maybe you can't tell whether his dog ate
his homework or not if you happen to
know he doesn't have a dog
you might have more confidence right you
will need to have a wider range of
evidence than a typical person would
when they're encountering that actual
excuse in order to see past the excuse
that will just be a general feature of
this so in order if i say you know
there's a usual story about where we go
to the doctor and then there's this
other explanation you know it'll be true
that you'll have to look at wider data
in order to see that because
you know people don't usually offer
excuses unless in the local context of
their excuse they can get away with it
that is it's hard to tell right
so in the case of medicine i have to
point you to sort of larger sets of data
but in many areas of academia including
health economics
the researchers there also
want to support the usual points of view
and so they will
have selection effects in their
publications and their analysis whereby
they
if they're getting a result too much
contrary to the usual point of view
everybody wants to have they will file
draw that paper
or redo the analysis until they get an
answer that's more to people's liking
so that means in the health economics
literature there are plenty of people
who will claim that in fact we have
evidence that medicine is effective
and when i respond i will have to point
you to our most reliable evidence
and ask you to consider the possibility
that the literature is biased in that
when the when the evidence isn't as
reliable when they have more degrees of
freedom in order to get the answer they
want they do tend to get the answer they
want but
when we get to the kind of evidence
that's much harder to mess with
that's where the that's where we will
see the truth be more revealed so with
respect to medicine
we have millions of papers published in
medicine over the years most of which
give the impression that medicine is
useful
there's a small literature on randomized
experiments of the aggregate effects of
medicine where there's you know maybe a
few half dozen or so papers
where it would be the hardest to hide it
because it's such a straightforward
experiment done in a straightforward way
that um
you know it's hard to manipulate and
that's where i will point you to to show
you that there's relatively little
correlation between health and medicine
but even then
people could try to save the phenomenon
and say well it's not hidden motives
it's just ignorance they could say for
example
you know medicine's complicated most
people don't know the literature
therefore
they can be excused for for ignorance
they are just ignorantly assuming that
medicine is effective it's not that they
have some other motive that they're
trying to achieve
and then i will have to do you know as
with a conspiracy theory analysis and
i'm saying well like how long has this
misperception be going on how
consistently has it happened around the
world and across time
and i would have to say look uh you know
if we're talking about say a recent new
product like segway scooters or
something
i could say not so many people have seen
them or use them maybe they could be
confused about their value if we're
talking about a product that's been
around for thousands of years used in
roughly the same way all across the
world and we see the same pattern over
and over again
this sort of
ignorance mistake just doesn't work so
well it also is a question of
how much of the self-deception
is prevalent versus foundational
because there's a kind of implied thing
where it's foundational to human
nature versus just a common pitfall
this is this is a question i have so
like maybe maybe human progress is made
by people
who don't fall into the self-deception
it's it's like it's a baser aspect of
human nature but then you escape it
easily if you if you're motivated
the motivational hypotheses about these
self-deceptions are in terms of how it
makes you look to the people around you
again the press secretary yes so the
story would be
most people want to look good to the
people around them
therefore most people present themselves
in ways that
help them look good to the people around
them
that's sufficient to say there would be
a lot of it it doesn't need to be 100
right there's enough variety in people
and in circumstances that sometimes
taking a contrary in strategy can be in
the interest of some minority of the
people
so i might for example say that that's a
strategy i've taken
i've decided that uh
being contrarian on these things could
be winning for me
in that there's a room for a small
number of people like me who have
these sort of messages who can then get
more attention even if there's not room
for most people to do that
and uh that can be explaining sort of
the variety right so similarly you might
say look
just look at the most obvious things
most people would like to look good
right in the sense of physically just
you look good right now you're wearing a
nice suit you have a haircut you shaved
right
so and we accept my own hair but okay
well that's all more impressive that's
the counter uh that's the counter
argument for your claim right
so clearly if we look at most people in
their physical appearance clearly most
people are trying to look somewhat nice
right they shower they they shave they
comb their hair but we certainly see
some people around who are not trying to
look so nice right is that a
big challenge the hypothesis that people
want to look nice not that much right we
can see
in the those particular people's context
more particular reasons why they've
chosen to be an exception to the more
general rule
so the general rule does reveal
something foundational generally
right that's that's the way things work
let me let me ask you you wrote a blog
post about the accuracy of authorities
since we're talking about this
especially in medicine
uh
just looking around us
especially during this time of the
pandemic there's been a growing distrust
of authorities of institutions
even an institution of science itself
what are the pros and cons of
authorities would you say
so what's nice about authorities
what's nice about institutions and what
are their pitfalls
one standard function of authority is as
something you can defer to respectively
without needing to seem too submissive
or
ignorant or um
you know gullible
that is uh
you know when you're asking what should
i be act on or what belief should i act
on
you might be worried if i chose
something too contrarian too weird too
speculative that
that would look make me look bad so i
would just choose something very
conservative
so maybe an authority lets you choose
something a little less conservative
because the authority is your
authorization the authority will let you
do it and you can say and somebody says
why did you do that thing and they say
the authority authorized it the
authority tells me i should do this why
aren't you doing it right so the
authority's often pushing for the
conservative well no the authority can
do more i mean so for example we just
think about
i don't know in a pandemic even right
you could just think i'll just stay home
and close all the doors or i'll just
ignore it right you could just think of
just some very simple strategy that
might be defensible if there were no
authorities
right but authorities might be able to
know more than that they might be able
to like look at some evidence draw a
more context-dependent conclusion
declare it as the authority's opinion
and then other people might follow that
and that could be better than doing
nothing so what you mentioned who
the world's most beloved organization
uh
so
you know this is me speaking in general
who and cdc has been
kind of i depending on degrees and right
uh
details just not
behaving as i would have imagined in the
best possible evolution of human
civilization authorities should act they
seem to have failed
in some fundamental way in terms of
leadership in a difficult time for our
society
can you
say what are the pros and cons of this
particular
authority
so again
if there were no authorities whatsoever
no accepted authorities right then
people would sort of have to sort of
randomly pick different local
authorities who would conflict with each
other and then they'd be fighting each
other about that or just not believe
anybody and just do some initial default
action that you would always do without
responding to context so the potential
gain of an authority is that they could
no more than just basic ignorance and if
people followed them they could both be
more informed than ignorance and all
doing the same thing so they're each
protected from being accused or
complained about that's that that's the
idea of an authority that would be the
good id where's the con
okay so what's the negative how does
that go wrong the con is that if you
think of yourself as the authority and
asking what's my best strategy as an
authority it's unfortunately not to be
maximally informative
so you might think the ideal authority
would not just tell you more than
ignorance it would tell you as much as
possible
okay it would give you as much detail as
you could possibly listen to and manage
to assimilate
and it would update that as frequently
as possible or as frequently as you were
able to listen and assimilate and
that would be the maximally informative
authority
the problem is there's a conflict
between
being an authority or being seen as an
authority and being maximally
informative that was the point of my
blog post that you're pointing out to
here
that is if you look at it from their
point of view
they won't
long remain
the perceived authority if they are
too
cauti in cautious about
how they use that authority and one of
the ways to being cautious would be to
be too informative
okay that's still in the pro column for
me because you're talking about the
tensions that are very
uh data-driven and very honest and i
would hope that authorities
struggle with that how much information
to provide
to people to maximize
to maximize outcomes now i'm generally
somebody that believes more information
is better because i trust in the
intelligence of people but i'd like to
mention
a bigger con on authorities which is the
human question this comes back to global
government and so on
is that you know there's humans
that
sit in chairs during meetings in those
authorities they have different titles
it's humans form hierarchies and
sometimes those titles get to your head
a little bit
and you start to want to think how do i
preserve my control over this authority
as opposed to thinking through like
what is the mission of the authority
what is the mission of wh o any other
such organization and how do i maximize
the implementation of that mission you
start to think
well i kind of like sitting in this big
chair at the head of the table i'd like
to sit there for another few years or
better yet i want to be remembered as
the person who in a time of crisis
was at the head of this authority and
did a lot of good things
so you stop trying to do good
under what good means given the mission
of the authority and you start to try to
carve a narrative
to manipulate the narrative first in the
meeting room everybody around you just a
small little story you tell yourself the
new interns
the the managers throughout the whole
hierarchy of the company okay once you
everybody in the company or an
organization believes this narrative
now you start to
control this the release of information
not because you're trying to maximize
outcomes but because you're trying to
maximize the effectiveness of the
narrative that you are truly a great
um
representative of this authority in
human history and i just feel like those
human forces
whenever you have an authority it starts
getting to people's heads one of the
most this me as a scientist one of the
most disappointing things to see during
the pandemic
is the use of authority
from colleagues of mine
to roll their eyes
to dismiss
other human beings
just because they got a phd just because
they're an assistant associate for
faculty just because they are deputy
head of ex-organization
nih whatever the heck the organization
is just because they got an award of
some kind and
at a conference they won a best paper
award seven years ago and then somebody
shook their hand and gave him a medal
maybe it was a president and there and
it's been 20 30 years that people have
been patting them on the back saying how
special they are especially when they
are controlling money and getting sucked
up
to from other scientists who really want
the money in a self-deception kind of
way they don't actually really care
about your performance and all of that
gets to your head and no longer are you
the authority that's trying to do good
and lessen the suffering in the world
you become an authority that just wants
to maximize uh
self-preserve yourself in in a
uh sitting on a throne of power so this
is core to sort of what it is to be an
economist
i'm a professor of economics
there you go for the authority again no
so it's about saying just joking yes we
often have a situation where we see a
world of behavior
and then we see ways in which particular
behaviors are not sort of maximally
socially useful
yes
and
we have a variety of reactions to that
so one kind of reaction is to sort of
morally blame each individual
for not doing the maxillary socially
useful thing
under perhaps the idea that people could
be identified and shamed for that and
may be induced into doing the better
thing if only enough people were calling
them out on it right
but another way to think about it is to
think that people sit in institutions
with certain
you know stable institutional structures
and that institutions create particular
incentives for individuals
and that individuals are typically
doing whatever is in their local
interest in the context of that
institution
and then you know perhaps to less blame
individuals for winning their local
institutional game and more blaming the
world for having the wrong institutions
so economists are often like wondering
what other institutions we could have
instead of the ones we have and which of
them might promote better behavior and
this is a common
thing we do all across human behavior is
to think of what are the institutions
we're in and what are the alternative
variations we could imagine and then to
say which institutions would be most
productive
i would agree with you that our
information institutions that is the
information institutions by which we
collect information and aggregate it and
share with people are especially broken
in the sense of far from the ideal of
what would be the most cost-effective
way to collect and share information
but then the challenge is to try to
produce
better institutions
and you know as an academic i'm aware
that academia is particularly broken
in the sense that we give people
incentives to you know do research
that's not very interesting or important
because basically they're being
impressive and we actually care more
about whether academics are impressive
than whether they're interesting or
useful
and
i know i can go happy to go into detail
with lots of different known
institutions and their known
institutional failings ways in which
those institutions produce you know
incentives that are mistaken and that
was the point of the post we started
with talking about the authorities if if
i need to be seen as an authority
that's at odds with my
being informative and i'm i might choose
to be the authority instead of being
informative because that's my
institutional incentives and if i may
i'd like to given that
beautiful
picture of incentives and individuals
that you just painted
let me just apologize for a couple of
things one i often put
too much blame
on leaders of institutions
versus the incentives that govern those
institutions
and as a result of that i've been
i believe too critical of anthony fauci
too emotional
about my criticism of anthony apology
and i'd like to apologize for that
because
i think there's a deep there's deeper
truths to think about there's deeper
incentives to think about that said i do
sort of
i'm a romantic creature by nature
i romanticize winston churchill and
i
when i think about nazi germany i think
about hitler more than i do about the
individual people of nazi germany you
think about leaders you think about
individuals not necessarily the
parameters the incentives that govern
the system that uh because it's harder
it's harder to think through deeply
about the models
from which those individuals arise but
if that's the right thing to do so uh
but also i don't apologize
uh for being emotional sometimes and
being i'm happy to blame the individual
leaders in the sense that you know i
might say well you should be trying to
reform these institutions if you're just
there to like get promoted and look good
at being at the top but maybe i can
blame you for your motives and your
priorities in there but i can understand
why the people at the top would be the
people who are selected for having the
priority of primarily trying to get to
the top
i get that
can i maybe ask you about
particular universities they've received
like science
has received an increase in distrust
overall as an institution which breaks
my heart
because i think science is beautiful as
a not maybe not as a institution but
as as one of the things
one of the journeys that humans have
taken on uh the other one is university
i think university is actually a place
for me at least
in the way i see it is
a place of freedom of exploring ideas
scientific engineering ideas engineering
ideas
more than
a corporate more than a company more
than a lot of domains in life they're
it's not just in its ideal but it's in
its implementation
a place where you can be a kid for your
whole life and play with ideas and i
think
with all the criticism that universities
still
not currently receive
i think they
i don't think that criticism is
representative of universities they
focus on very anecdotal evidence of
particular departments particular people
but i still feel like there's a lot of
place
for freedom of
thought
at least you know mit
at least in the fields i care about you
know in a particular kind of science
uh particular kind of technical fields
you know
mathematics computer science physics
engineering so robotics artificial
intelligence
this is a place where you get to be a
kid
yet
there is bureaucracy that's
that's rising up there's like more rules
there's more meetings and there's more
administration
having like powerpoint presentations
which to me
you should
like
uh
be more of a renegade explorer of ideas
and meetings destroy they suffocate
that radical thought that happens when
you're an undergraduate student and you
can do all kinds of wild things when
you're a graduate student anyway all
that to say you've thought about this
aspect too is there something
uh positive
insightful you could say about how we
can
make for better universities in the
decades to come this particular
institution
how can we improve them
i hear that centuries ago many
scientists and intellectuals were
aristocrats
they had time
and
could if they chose choose to be
intellectuals
that's a feature of the combination that
they had some source of resources that
allowed them leisure and that the kind
of competition they were faced in among
aristocrats allowed
that sort of a self-indulgence or
self-pursuit at least at some point in
their lives
so the analogous
observation is that
university professors
often have
sort of the freedom and space to do a
wide range of things and i am certainly
enjoying that as a tenured professor
you're really sorry to interrupt a
really good representative of that just
the exploration you're doing the depth
of thought the like
most people are afraid to do the kind of
broad thinking that you're doing which
is good the fact that
that can happen is the combination of
these two things analogously one is that
we have fierce competition to become a
tenured professor but then once you
become tenured we give you the freedom
to do what you like
and that's a happenstance that didn't
have to be that way and in many other
walks of life even though people have a
lot of you know resources etc they don't
have that kind of freedom set up so
i think we're kind of i'm kind of lucky
that tenure exists
and that i'm enjoying it um but i can't
be
too enthusiastic about this unless i can
approve of sort of the source of the
resources that's paying for all this
right so for the aristocrat if you
thought they they stole it in war or
something
you wouldn't be so pleased whereas if
you thought they had earned it or their
ancestors had earned this money that
they were spending as an aristocrat then
you could be more okay with that right
so
for universities i have to ask you know
where are the main sources of resources
that are going to the universities and
are they getting their money's worth or
are they getting a real good value for
that payment
right
so first of all they're students
and
the question is are students getting
good value for their education and
you know on each person is getting value
in the sense that they are identified
and shown to be a more capable person
which is then worth more salary as an
employee later
but there is a case for saying there's a
big waste to the system because we
aren't actually changing the students or
educating them we're more sorting them
or
labeling them
and that's a very expensive process to
produce that outcome and part of the
expense is the you know freedom of from
tenure i get so
i feel like i can't be too proud of that
because it's basically a tax on all
these young students to pay this
enormous amount of money in order to be
labeled as better whereas i feel like we
should be able to find cheaper ways of
doing that
the other main customer is
researcher patrons like the unit the
government or other foundations and then
the question is are they getting their
money worth out of the money they're
paying for research to
happen and
my analysis is they don't actually care
about the research progress they are
mainly buying an affiliation with
credentialed impressiveness on the part
of the researchers they mainly pay money
to researchers who are impressive and
have high you know impressive
affiliations and they don't really much
care what research project happens as a
result
is that a cynical
so that there's a deep truth to that
cynical perspective is there
a less clinical perspective that they do
care
about the long-term investment into the
progress of science and humanity they
might personally care but they're stuck
in an equilibrium
sure wherein they basically most
foundations like governments or research
or you know like the ford foundation
they are
the individuals there are rated based on
the prestige they bring to that
organization
yeah and even if they might personally
want to produce more intellectual
progress they are in a competitive game
where they don't have tenure
and
they need to produce this prestige and
so once they give grant money to
prestigious people that is the thing
that shows that they have achieved
prestige for the organization and that's
what they need to do in order to retain
their position
and you do hope that there's a
correlation between prestige and actual
competence of course there is a
correlation the question is just could
we do this better some other way yes i
think it's almost i think it's pretty
clear we could
what is harder to do is move the world
to a new equilibrium where we do that
instead
uh what are the components of of the
better ways to do it is it
uh
money so how the sources of money and
how the money is allocated to give the
individual researchers
freedom
years ago i started studying this topic
exactly because this was my issue and
this was many decades ago now and i
spent a long time and my best guess
still is prediction markets
betting markets so
if you as a research paper patron want
to know the answer to a particular
question like what's the mass of the
electron neutrino
then what you can do is just subsidize a
betting market in that question and that
will induce more research into answering
that question because the people who
then answer that question can then make
money in that betting market with the
new information they gain
so that's a robust way to induce more
information on a topic if you want to
induce an accomplishment you can create
prizes and there's of course a long
history of prizes to induce
accomplishments
and we moved away from prizes
even though we once had used them a far
more often than we did today
and there's a history to that
uh
and for the customers who want to be
affiliated with impressive academics
which is what most of the customers want
students journalists and patrons i think
there's a better way of doing that which
i just wrote about in a my second most
recent blog post
can you explain sure what we do today is
we take sort of acceptance by other
academics recently
as our best indication of their deserved
prestige that is recent publications
recent you know job affiliation
institutional affiliations recent you
know invitations to speak recent grants
we are today taking other
impressive academics recent
choices to affiliate with them as our
best guesstimate of their prestige
i would say we could do better by
creating betting markets in what the
distant future will judge to have been
their deserved prestige looking back on
them
i think most intellectuals for example
think that if we look back two centuries
say to intellectuals from two centuries
ago
and tried to look in detail at their
research and how it influenced future
research and which path it was on we
could much but more accurately judge
their actual deserved prestige that is
who was actually on the right track who
actually helped
which will be different than what people
at the time judged using the immediate
indications of the time of which
position they had or which publications
they had or things like that so in this
way if you think
from the perspective of multiple
centuries
you would
higher prioritize true novelty you would
disregard the temporal proximity like
how recent the thing is
and you would think like what is the
brave the bold the big
novel idea that this and you would
actually
you would be able to rate that because
you could see the path with which ideas
took which things had dead ends which
led to what other followings you could
looking back centuries later
have a much better estimate of who
actually had what long-term effects on
intellectual progress so my proposal is
we actually pay people in several
centuries to do this historical analysis
and we have betting mark we have
prediction markets today where we buy
and sell assets which will later off pay
off in terms of those final evaluations
so now we'll be inducing people today to
make their best estimate of those things
by actually
you know looking at the details of
people and setting the prices according
so my proposal would be we rate people
today on those prices today so instead
of looking at their list of publications
or affiliations you look at the actual
price of assets that represent
people's best guess of what the future
will say about them that's brilliant so
this concept of idea futures
can you elaborate
what this would entail
i've been elaborating two versions of it
here so one is if there's a particular
question say the mass of the electron
neutrino
and what you as a patron want to do is
get an answer to that question
then what you would do is subsidize the
betting market in that question under
the assumption that eventually we'll
just know the answer and we can pay off
the bets that way
right and that is a plausible assumption
for many kinds of concrete intellectual
questions like what's the mass of the
electron neutrino in this hypothetical
world these are constructing the maybe a
real world do you mean literally
financial yes literal little very
literal
very cash
very direct and literal yes so or
well crypto is whatever yes true so the
idea would be research labs would be
for-profit
they would have as their expense paying
researchers to study things and then
their profit would come from using the
insights the researchers gains to trade
in these financial markets
just like hedge funds today make money
by paying researchers to study firms and
then making their profits by trading on
those that that insight in the ordinary
financial and the market would
if it's efficient would be able to
become better and better predicting
the powerful ideas that the individual
is able to generate the variance around
the mass of the electron neutrino would
decrease with time as we learned that
value of that parameter better and any
other parameters that we want to
decimate you don't think those markets
would also respond to recency of
prestige and all those kinds of things
they would respond but the question is
if they might respond incorrectly but if
you think they're doing it incorrectly
you have a profit
you can go fix it so we'd be inviting
everybody to ask whether they can find
any biases or errors in the current ways
in which people are estimating these
things from whatever clues they have
right there's a big incentive for the
correction mechanism in in academia
currently there's not
you it's the safe choice to to go with
the procedure
and there's no even if you privately
think that the prestige is over
overrated even if in the case think
strongly that's overrated still you
don't have an incentive to defy that
publicly you're going to lose a lot
unless
you're a contrarian that writes
brilliant blogs and and then you could
you could talk about or have pockets
right i mean initially this was my
initial concept of having these betting
markets on these key parameters what i
then realized over time was that that's
more what people pretend to care about
what they really mostly care about is
just who's how good
yeah and that's what most of the system
is built on is trying to rate people and
rank them and so i designed this other
alternative based on historical
evaluation centuries later just about
who's how how good because that's what i
think most of the customers really care
about
customers i like the word customers here
humans right well every major area of
life
which you know has specialists who get
paid to do that thing must have some
customers from elsewhere who are paying
for it
well who are the customers for the mass
of the neutrino but yes i i i understand
a sense people who are willing to
pay
right for a thing that's an important
thing to understand about anything who
are the customers so what i think and
what's the product like medicine
education academia
military etc
that's part of the hidden motives
analysis often people have a thing they
say about what the product is and who
the customer is and maybe you need to
dig a little deeper to find out what's
really going on or a lot deeper
you are you've written that you seek out
quote view quakes
you're able as a uh as an intelligent
black box word generating machine you're
able to generate a lot of sexy words i
like it i love it view quakes
which are insights which dramatically
change my world view your world view
uh you write i loved science fiction as
a child studied physics and artificial
intelligence for a long time each
and now study economics and political
science all fields full of such insights
so let me ask what are some view quakes
or a beautiful surprising idea to you
from each of those fields physics ai
economics political science i know it's
a tough question something that springs
to mind about physics for example that
just is beautiful i mean right from the
beginning say special relativity was a
big surprise
uh you know most of us have a simple
concept of time and it seems perfectly
adequate for everything we've ever seen
and to have it explained to you that you
need to sort of have a mixture concept
of time and space where you put it into
the space-time construct how it looks
different from different perspectives
that was quite a shock
and that was
you know such a shock that it makes you
think what else do i know that you know
isn't the way it seems certainly quantum
mechanics is certainly another enormous
shock in terms of from your point you
know you have this idea that there's a
space and then there's you know
point particles at points and maybe
fields in between
and um quantum mechanics is just a whole
different representation it looks
nothing like what you would have thought
as sort of the basic representation of
of the physical world and that was quite
a surprise what would you say is the
catalyst
for the for the view quake in in in
theoretical physics in the 20th century
what where does that come from so the
interesting thing about einstein it
seems like a lot of that came from like
almost thought experiments it wasn't
almost experimentally driven
um and with actually i don't
know
the full story of quantum mechanics how
much of it is experiment like where
if you look at the full trace of idea
generation there uh of all the weird
stuff that falls out of quantum
mechanics how much of that was the
experimentalist how much was it the
theoreticians but usually in theoretical
physics the theories lead the way so
maybe can you uh
can you elucidate like what what is the
catalyst for these
the remarkable thing about physics and
about many other areas of academic
intellectual life is that it just seems
way over determined that is
if it hadn't been for einstein or if it
hadn't been for heisenberg certainly
within a half a century somebody else
would have come up with essentially the
same things
is this something you believe yeah
something yes so i think when you look
at sort of just the history of physics
in the history of other areas you know
some areas like that there's just this
enormous convergence that the the
different kind of evidence that was
being collected
was so redundant in the sense that so
many different things revealed the same
things that eventually you just kind of
have to accept it because it just gets
obvious
so if you look at the details of course
you know
einstein did it for somebody else and
it's well worth celebrating einstein for
that and you know we by celebrating the
particular people who did something
first or came across something first we
are encouraging all the rest to move a
little faster
to try to
to push us all a little faster which is
great
but
i still think we would have gotten
roughly to the same place within half
centuries so
sometimes people are special because of
how much longer it would have taken so
some people say general relativity would
have taken longer without einstein than
other things i mean
heisenberg quantum mechanics i mean
there were several different
formulations of quantum mechanics all
around the same few years means no one
of them made that much of a difference
we would have had pretty much the same
thing regardless of which of them did it
exactly when
nevertheless i'm happy to celebrate them
all but this is a choice i make in my
research that is when there's an area
where there's lots of people working
together you know who are sort of
scoping each other and getting getting a
result just before somebody else does
you ask well how much of a difference
would i make there
at most i could make something happen a
few months before somebody else and so
i'm less worried about them missing
things so when i'm trying to help the
world like doing research i'm looking
for neglected things i'm looking for
things that nobody's doing it if i
didn't do it nobody would do it
nobody would do it or at least in the
next time 20 years kind of thing exactly
same with general relativity just you
know who would do it
it might take another 10 20 30 50 years
so that's the place where you can have
the biggest impact is finding the things
that nobody would do unless you did them
and then that's when you get the big
view quake the insight so what about
artificial intelligence would it be uh
the ems the emulated minds
what idea
what whether
that struck you
in the shower one day
or
well or are they you just clearly the
biggest view quake in artificial
intelligence is the realization of just
how complicated our human minds are so
most people who come to artificial
intelligence from other fields or from
relative ignorance
a very common phenomenon which you must
be familiar with is that they come up
with some concept and then they think
that must be it
once we implement this new concept we
will have it we will have full human
level or higher artificial intelligence
right and they are just
not appreciating just how big the
problem is how long the road is just how
much is involved because that's actually
hard to appreciate when we just think it
seems really simple
and studying artificial intelligence
going through many particular problems
looking at each problem all the
different things you need to be able to
do to solve a problem like that
makes you realize all the things your
minds are doing that you are not aware
of that's that vast subconscious
that you're not aware that's the biggest
viewcase from artificial intelligence by
far for most people who study artificial
intelligence is to see just how hard it
is i think uh that's a good point but i
think it's a it's a very early view
quake it's when the uh
uh sure done in kruger crashes
hard it's the first realization that
humans are actually quite incredible the
human mind the human body is quite a lot
of different parts to it
but then
see i it's already been so long for me
that i've experienced that view quake
that for me
i now experience the view quakes of holy
this little thing is actually quite
powerful like neural networks i'm amazed
because
you've become
more cynical after that first view quake
of like this is so hard like evolution
did some incredible work to create a
human mind but then you realize just
because you have you've talked about a
bunch of simple models
that simple things can actually be
extremely powerful that maybe uh
emulating of the human mind is extremely
difficult but you can go a long way with
a large neural network you can go a long
way with a dumb solution it's that
stuart russell thing with the
reinforcement learning
right holy crap you can do you can go a
long way with us but we still have a
very long road to go but nonetheless
i can't i refuse to sort of know the the
road
on the road is full of surprises so long
sure is an interesting like you said
with the six
hard steps that humans had to take to
arrive at where we are from the origin
of life on earth
so it's long maybe in the
statistical improbability of the steps
that have to be taken
but in terms of how quickly those steps
could be taken i don't know if my
intuition says it's
if it's hundreds of years away or if
it's
uh
a couple of years away
i i prefer to measure pretty confidence
at least a decade and well we can file
the confidence at least three decades i
can steal man either direction i prefer
to measure that journey in elon musk's
that's the new uh well we don't get any
less very often so that's that's a long
time scale for now i don't know maybe
you can clone or maybe multiply or even
know what elon musk
what that is what is that what is that's
a good question exactly
well that's an excellent question how
does that and then how does that fit
into the model the three parameters
that are required for becoming a grabby
alien civilization that's the question
of how much any individual makes in the
long path of civilization over time
yes and you know it's a favorite topic
of historians and people to try to like
focus on individuals and how much of a
difference they make and certainly some
individuals make a substantial
difference in the modest term
right
uh like you know certainly without
hitler being hitler in the role he took
european history would have taken a
different path for for a while there um
but if we're looking over like many
centuries longer term things most
individuals do fade in their individual
influence
so
i mean einstein you and einstein
[Applause]
no matter how sexy your hair is you will
also be forgotten in the long arc of
history uh so you said at least 10 years
so let's talk a little bit about
this ai point
um of where how we achieve how hard is
the problem of solving intelligence
uh by engineering artificial
intelligence that achieves human level
human-like qualities that we associate
with intelligence how hard is this what
are the different trajectories that take
us there
one way to think about it is in terms of
the scope of the technology space you're
talking about so
let's take the biggest possible scope
all of human technology right the entire
human economy so the entire
economy is composed of many industries
each of which have many products with
many different technologies supporting
each one
at that scale i think we can accept that
um
most innovations are a small fraction of
the total that is usually has relatively
gradual overall progress
and that individual innovations
that are have a substantial effect the
total are rare and their total effect is
still a small percentage of the of the
total economy right there's very few
individual innovations that
made a substantial difference to the
whole economy right what are we talking
steam engine you know shipping
containers you know a few things
uh shipping shipping containers deserves
to be up there with steam engines
honestly
uh can you say exactly why shipping
containers
uh containers revolutionized shipping
and shipping is very important
but placing that as shipping containers
so you're saying you wouldn't have some
of the magic of the supply chain and all
that without shipping containers that
made a big difference absolutely
interesting that's something to look
into i don't i we shouldn't we shouldn't
take that tangent although i'm tempted
to but anyway so there's a few just a
few innovations right so at the scale of
the whole economy right
now as you move down to a much smaller
scale um you will see
individual innovations having a bigger
effect
right so if you look at i don't know
lawn mowers or something
i don't know about the innovations lawn
mower but there are probably like steps
where you just had a new kind of
lawnmower and that made a big difference
to mowing lawns
because you're you're focusing on a
smaller part of the whole technology
space right so
um
and you know sometimes like military
technology there's a lot of military
technology there's a lot of small ones
but every once in a while a particular
military weapon like makes a big
difference
but still even so mostly overall they're
making modest differences to a something
that's increasing relatively stable like
us military is the strongest in the
world
consistently for a while no one weapon
in the last 70 years has like
made a big difference in terms of the
overall prominence of the us military
right because that's just saying even
though every once in a while even the
recent soviet hyper missiles or whatever
they are they aren't
changing the overall balance
dramatically right
so when we get to ai now the now i can
frame the question how big is ai
basically if so one way of thinking
about ais is just all mental tasks and
then you ask what fraction of tasks are
mental tasks and then i go a lot
and then if i think of ai is like half
of everything
then i think well it's got to be
composed of lots of parts where anyone
innovation is only a small impact right
now if you think no no ai is like agi
and then you think
agi is a small thing right there's only
a small number of key innovations that
will enable it
now you're thinking there could be a
bigger
chunk that you might find that would
have a bigger impact so the way i would
ask you to frame these things in terms
the chunkiness
of different areas of technology
in part in terms of how big they are if
you take
10 chunky areas and you add them
together the total is less chunky yeah
but don't you are you able until you
solve
the fundamental core
parts of the problem to estimate the
chunkiness of that problem
well if you have a history of prior
chunkiness that could be your best
estimate for future chunkiness so for
example i mean even at the level of the
world economy right we've had this what
10 000 years of
civilization well that's only a short
time
you might say oh that that doesn't
predict future chunkiness
uh but you know looks relatively steady
and consistent
we can say even in computer science
we've had you know seven years of
computer science we have enough data to
look at chunkiness in computer science
like when were there algorithms or
approaches that made a big chunky
difference and you know
versus and how large a fraction of that
was that and i'd say mostly in computer
science most innovation has been
relatively small chunks the bigger
chunks have been rare
well this is the interesting thing this
is about ai and just algorithms in
general
is
you know pagerank so google's right
so
sometimes it's a simple algorithm that
by itself
is not that useful but the scale context
and in a context that's scalable like
right depending on yeah depending on the
context is all of a sudden the power is
revealed and there's something i guess
that's the nature of chunkiness
is um
that you could things that can reach a
lot of people simply
can be quite challenging so one standard
story about algorithms is to say
algorithms have a fixed cost plus a
marginal cost
and so
in history when you had computers are
very small you tried all the algorithms
had low fixed costs
and you look for the best of those but
over time as computers got bigger you
could afford to do larger fixed costs
and try those and some of those had
more effective algorithms in terms of
their marginal cost
and that in fact you know that it
roughly explains the long-term history
where in fact the rate of algorithmic
improvement is about the same as the
rate of hardware improvement
which is a remarkable coincidence
but it would be explained by saying well
there's all these better algorithms you
can't try until you have a big enough
computer to pay the fixed cost of doing
some trials to find out if that
algorithm actually saves you on the
marginal cost
and so
that's an explanation for this
relatively continuous history where so
we have a good story about why hardware
is so continuous right and you might
think why would software be so
continuous
with the hardware but if there's a
distribution of algorithms in terms of
their fixed costs and it's safe spread
out a wide log normal distribution then
we could be sort of marching through
that log normal distribution
trying out algorithms with larger fixed
costs and finding the ones that have
lower marginal cost
so
would you say agi human level
ai
even em
m
emulated minds
is uh chunky
like a few breakthroughs can take so and
m is by its nature chunky in the sense
that if you have an emulated brain and
you're 25 effective at emulating it
that's crap that's nothing
okay okay
you pretty much need to emulate a full
human brain is that obvious
is that obviously
pretty obvious i'm talking about like
you know
so the key thing is you're emulating
various brain cells and so you have to
emulate the input output pattern of
those cells so if you get that pattern
somewhat close but not close enough then
the whole system just doesn't have the
overall behavior you're looking for
right but it could have functionally
some of the power of the overall so
there'll be some threshold the question
is when you get close enough then it
goes over the threshold it's like taking
a computer chip and deleting every one
percent of the of the gates right
no that's that's very chunky but uh
right hope is that the emulating the
human brain i mean the human brain
itself is not right so it has a certain
level of redundancy and a certain level
of robustness and so there's some
threshold when you get close to that
level of redundancy and robustness then
it starts to work but until you you know
until you get to that level it's just
going to be crap right yeah it's going
to be just a big thing that isn't
working well so we can be pretty sure
that emulations is is a big chunk in an
economic sense right at some point
you'll be able to make one that's
actually effective
in enable substituting for humans and
then that will be this huge economic
product that people will try to buy like
crazy now you bring a lot of value to
people's lives so they'll be able to
they'll be willing to pay for it
but it could be that you know the first
emulation costs a billion dollars each
right and then we have them but we can't
really use them too expensive then the
cost slowly comes down and now we have
less of a chunky adaptation adoption
right
that as the cross comes down then we use
more and more of them in more and more
context
and that's a more continuous curve
so it's only if the first emulations are
relatively cheap that you get of more
sudden disruption to society uh and that
could happen if sort of the algorithm is
the last thing you figure out how to do
or something what about robots that
capture some magic
um
in terms of social connection
the robots like we have a robot dog on
the carpet right there uh
robots that are able to capture some
magic of human connection
as they interact with humans but are not
emulating the brain what about what
about those how far away
so
we're thinking about chunkiness or
distance now so if you ask how chunky is
the task of making a you know emulatable
robot or something you know
which chunkiness and time are
correlated right but that it's about how
far away it is or how suddenly it would
happen
uh chunkiness is how suddenly
and you know difficulty is just how far
away it is but it could be a continuous
difficulty it would just be far away but
will slowly steadily get there or there
could be these thresholds where we reach
a threshold and suddenly we can do a lot
better yeah that's a good i mean
question for both i tend to believe that
all of it not just the m
but agi too is chunky
and
um human level intelligence so my my
best body in robots is also junk because
the history of computer science and
chunkiness so far seems to be my rough
best guess for the chunkiness of agi
that is it is chunky it's modestly
chunky not that chunky right because
our ability chunky peanut butter too
many things in the economy has been
moving relatively steadily overall in
terms of our use of computers in society
they have been relatively steadily
improving for 70 years no but i would
say that's hard well yeah okay
okay i would have to really think about
that because uh neural networks are
quite surprising
sure but every once in a while we have a
new thing that's surprising but if you
stand back you know we see something
like that every 10 10 years or so some
new innovation is gradual that has a big
effect
so moderately chunky
huh
yeah the history of the level of
disruption we've seen in the past would
be a rough estimate of the level of
disruption in the future unless the
future is we're going to hit a chunky
territory much chunkier than we've seen
in the past well i do think there's um
it's like um like kunyan like revolution
type
it it seems like the data especially on
ai's
is is difficult to um
uh to reason with because it's so recent
it's such a recent field right it's been
around for 50 years
i mean 50 60 70 80 years being recent
okay that's the that's
it's enough time to see a lot of trends
a lot a few trends a few trends i think
the internet
computing
there's really a lot of interesting
stuff that's happened over the past 30
years
that
i think the possibility of revolutions
is likelier than it was
in the i think for the last 70 years
there have always been a lot of things
that look like they had a potential for
evolution so we can't reason well about
this i mean we can reason well by
looking at the past trends i would say
the past trend is roughly your best
guess for the future features but if i
look back at the things that might have
looked like revolutions in the 70s and
80s and 90s
uh
they are less like the revolutions of
that appear to be happening now or the
capacity of revolution that appear to be
there now first of all there's a lot of
more money to be made
so there's a lot more incentive for
markets to do a lot of kind of
innovation it seems like in the ai space
but
then again there's a history of winters
and summers and so on so maybe we're
just like riding a nice wave right now
one of the biggest issues is the
difference between impressive demos and
commercial value yes so we often through
the history of ai we saw very impressive
demos that never really translated much
into commercial values somebody who
works on and cares about autonomous and
semi-autonomous vehicles tell me about
it uh so
and there again we return to the number
of elon musk's per earth
per year yeah generated
uh
that's the um coincidentally same
initials as the m uh yeah uh very
suspicious very suspicious we're gonna
have to look into that all right two
more fields
that i would like to force and twist
your arm to all right to look for view
quakes and for beautiful ideas economics
what is what what is a beautiful idea to
you
about economics
you you mentioned a lot of them sure uh
so
as you said before there's going to be
the first view cake most people
encounter that makes the biggest
difference on average in the world
because that's the only thing most
people ever see is the first one
and so
you know with ai the first one is just
how big the problem is and but once you
get past that you'll find others
certainly for economics the first one is
just
the power of markets
um
you know you might have thought it's
just really hard to figure out how to to
optimize in a big complicated space and
markets just do a good first pass
for an awful lot of stuff and they are
really quite robust and powerful
and uh
that's just quite the view craig
where you just say you know just let up
if you if you want to get in the
ballpark just let a market handle it and
step back
and that's true for a wide range of
things it's not true for everything but
it's a it's a very good first
approximation most people's intuitions
for how they should limit markets are
actually messing them up
they're that good in sense right most
people when you go i don't know if we
want to trust that well you should be
trusting that
what about
wha
what are markets
like just a couple of words
uh so so the idea is if if people want
something then let other companies form
to try to supply that thing let those
people pay for their cost of whatever
they're making and try to offer that
product to those people that many people
many such firms enter that industry and
let the customers decide which ones they
want and if the firm goes out of
business let it go bankrupt and let
other people invest in whichever
ventures they want to try to try to
attract customers to their version of
the product
and that just works for a wide range of
products and services and through all of
this there's a free exchange of
information too
there's a hope that there's no
manipulation of information and so on
that they're um you're making these even
when those things happen still just the
simple market solution is usually better
than the things you'll try to do to fix
it then the alternative
um that that's that's a view quick it's
surprising it's you know it's not what
you would imagine they thought that's
one of the great
i guess inventions of human civilization
right that trust the
markets now another view cake that i
learned in my research that's not all of
economics but something more specialized
is
the rationality of disagreement that is
basically people who are trying to
believe what's true in a complicated
situation
would not actually disagree
and of course humans disagree all the
time so it was quite the striking fact
for me to learn in grad school that
actually
rational agents would not knowingly
disagree
and so that makes disagreement more
puzzling and and it makes you less
willing to disagree
humans are to some degree rational and
are able to
their priorities
are different than just figuring out the
truth
which might not be the same as being
irrational
that's another tangent that could take
an hour
in the space
of human affairs political science
what is a beautiful foundational
interesting idea to you a view quake in
the space of political science
the main thing that goes wrong in
politics is
people
not agreeing on what the best thing to
do is
that's the wrong thing so that's what
goes wrong that is when you say what's
fundamentally behind most political
failures it's that people are ignorant
of what the consequences of policy is
and that's surprising because it's
actually feasible to solve that problem
which we aren't solving so it's a bug
not a feature that there's a
there's a
inability to arrive at a consensus
so most political systems if everybody
looked to some authority say on a
question and that authority told them
the answer then most political systems
are capable of just doing that thing
but
that is uh and so it's the failure to
have trust for the authorities
yeah that is sort of the
underlying failure behind most political
failure we failed we have bad we invade
iraq say when we don't have an authority
to tell us that's a really stupid thing
to do
it's it's and it is possible to create
more informative trust for the
authorities that that's a remarkable
fact about the world of
institutions that we could do that but
we aren't
yeah that's that's surprising we could
and we aren't right and another big view
crick about politics is from the elf in
the brain that most people when they're
interacting with politics they say they
want to like make the world better and
make their city better their country
better that's not their priority
what is it so they they want to show
loyalty to their allies they want to
show their trouble they're on their side
yes
their various tribes are in that that's
that's their primary primary
priority and they do accomplish that
yeah and the tribes are usually
color-coded conveniently enough
um
what would you say
you know it's the churchill question uh
democracy is the the crappiest form of
government but it's the best one we got
um what's the best form of government
for this
our
seven billion human civilization and the
maybe as we get farther and farther you
mentioned a lot of stuff that's
fascinating about human history as we
become more forager-like
and looking out beyond what's the best
form of government in the next 50
hundred years as we become a multiple
terrorist species so
the the key failing is that
we have existing political institutions
and related institutions like in media
institutions and other authority
institutions and
these institutions sit in a vast space
of possible institutions yes and the key
failing we're just not exploring that
space
so i have made my proposals in that
space and i think i can identify many
promising solutions and many other
people have made many other promising
proposals in that space but the key
thing is we're just not pursuing those
proposals we're not trying them out on
small scales we're not doing tests we're
not
exploring the space of these options
that is the key thing we're failing to
do and if we did that
i am confident we would find much better
institutions than when we're using now
but we would have to actually try
so a lot of those topics um i do hope we
get a chance to talk again you're a
fascinating human being so i'm skipping
a lot of tangents on purpose that i
would love to take you're such a
brilliant person on so many different
topics
let me
take a
a stroll
into the uh
into the deep human
psyche of uh robin hansen himself
so first may not be that deep
[Laughter]
i might just be all on the surface what
you see is what you get there might not
be much hiding behind it some of the fun
is is on the surface and uh
i actually think this is true of many of
the most successful most interesting
people you see in the world that is
they have put so much effort into the
surface that they've constructed yeah
and that's where they put all their
energy like so somebody might be a a you
know a statesman or an actor or
something else and people want to
interview them and they want to say like
what are you behind the scenes what do
you do in your free time you know what
those people don't have free time they
don't have another life behind the
scenes they put all their energy into
this into that surface the one we admire
the one we're fascinated by and they
kind of have to make up the stuff behind
the scenes to supply it for you but it's
not really there well there's several
ways of phrasing this so one of his
authenticity which is um
the
if you become the thing you are on the
surface
if the depths mirror the surface
then that's what authenticity is you're
not hiding something you're not
concealing something to push back on the
idea of actors they actually have often
a manufactured surface that they put on
and they try on different masks
and the depths are very different from
the surface and that's actually what
makes them very not interesting to
interview if you are an actor who
actually
lives the role that
you play
so like i don't know a clint eastwood
type character who clearly represents
the the cowboy
like at least uh rhymes or echoes the
person you play on the surface that's
authentic some people are typecast and
they have basically one persona they
play in all of their movies and tv shows
and so those people it probably is the
actual person persona that they are yeah
or has become that over time you know
clint eastwood would be one i think of
tom hanks as another i think they just
always play the same person and you and
i are just uh both uh surface players
you're you're the fun brilliant
uh thinker and i am the suit wearing
uh
idiot full of silly questions all right
that said
uh
let's put on your wise
sage hat and ask you what advice would
you give to young people today in high
school and college
about life about how to live a
successful life
in career or just in general that they
can be proud of
most young people when they actually ask
you that question what they usually mean
is how can i be successful by usual
standards
yeah i'm not very good at giving advice
about that because that's not how i
tried to live my life
so i would more flip it around and say
you live in a rich society
you will have a long life you have many
resources available to you
whatever career you take you'll have
plenty of time to make progress on
something else
yes it might be better if you find a way
to to combine your career and your
interests in a way that gives you more
time and energy but there are often big
compromises there as well
so if you have a passion about some
topic or something that you think just
was worth pursuing you can just do it
you don't need other people's approval
and you can just start doing whatever it
is you think
is worth doing it might take you decades
but decades are enough to make enormous
progress on most all interesting things
and don't worry about the commitment of
it i mean that's a lot of what people
worry about is
well there's so many options and if i
choose a thing and i stick with it you
know i sacrificed all the other paths i
could have taken but i mean so i
switched my career at the age of 34 with
two kids age zero and two went back to
grad school and social science after
being a software
research software
engineer
so it's quite possible to change your
mind later in life
um how can you have an age of zero
less than one
okay so oh oh you index was there yeah i
got it okay right you know like people
also ask what to read and i say
textbooks
and until you've read lots of textbooks
or maybe review articles i'm not so sure
you should be reading you know
blog posts and
twitter feeds and even podcasts i would
say
at the beginning read the read you know
this is our best sum humanity's best
summary of how to learn things is
crammed into textbooks especially the
the ones on
like introduction to
everything introduction to everything
just read all the algorithms
read as many textbooks as you can
stomach and then maybe if you want to
know more about a subject find review
articles right you don't need to read
the latest stuff from most topics yeah
and actually textbooks often have the
the prettiest pictures there you go and
then depending on the field if it's
technical then doing the homework
problems at the end yeah it's actually
extremely extremely useful
extremely powerful way to understand
something if you allow it you know i
actually think of like high school and
college
which you you kind of remind me of
people don't often think of it that way
but
you'll almost
not again get an opportunity
to spend the time with the fundamental
stuff
and everybody's forcing you like
everybody wants you to do it
and like you'll never get that chance
again to sit there even though it's
outside of your interest biology like in
high school i took ap biology ap
chemistry
um
i'm thinking of subjects i never again
really visited seriously and it was so
nice to be forced into uh anatomy and
physiology
to be forced into that world to stay
with it to look at the pretty pictures
do certain moments to actually for a
moment enjoy the beauty of these
of like how cell works and all those
kinds of things and you're somehow that
stays like the ripples of that
fascination that stays with you even if
you never do those this if even if you
never
utilize those uh
learnings in your actual world a common
problem at least many young people i
meet is that they're like feeling
idealistic and altruistic but in a rush
yes so
you know the usual human tradition that
goes back you know hundreds of thousands
of years is that people's productivity
rises with time and maybe peaks around
the age of 40 or 50. the age of 40 50 is
when you will be having the highest
income you'll have the most contacts you
will sort of be wise about how the world
works
[Laughter]
expect to have your biggest impact then
before then
you are you can have impacts but you're
also mainly building up your resources
and abilities
um that's that's the usual human
trajectory expect that to be true of you
too don't be in such a rush to like
accomplish enormous things at the age of
18 or whatever i mean you might as well
practice trying to do things but
that's mostly about learning how to do
things by practicing there's a lot of
things you can't do unless you just keep
trying them
and when all else fails try to maximize
the number of offspring however way you
can
that's certainly something i've
neglected i would tell my younger
version of myself hey try to have more
descendants
yes absolutely
it matters more than i gave i realized
at the
both in terms of
making copies of yourself in in mutated
form
and
just the joy of raising them sure i mean
the the meaning even
you know
so in the literature on
the value people get out of life there's
a key distinction between happiness and
meaning
so happiness is how do you feel right
now about right now
and meaning is how do you feel about
your whole life
and you know many things that produce
happiness don't produce meaning as
reliably and if you have to choose
between them you'd rather have meaning
and
meaning is
more goes along with sacrificing
happiness sometimes
and children are an example of that do
you get a lot more meaning out of
children even if they're a lot more work
why do you think
kids children are so magical
like raising kids because i i'm
i would love to have kids and
um
whenever i work with robots there's some
of the same magic when there's an entity
that comes to life
and in that case
i'm not trying to draw too many
parallels but there is some
um echo to it which is when you program
a robot there's some aspect of your
intellect that is now instilled in this
other moving being
that's kind of magical
well why do you why why do you think
that's magical and you said happiness
and meaning
as opposed to a shorting full why is it
meaningful
it's over determined like i can give you
several different reasons all of which
is sufficient and so the question is we
don't know which ones are the correct
reasons technical
over it's over determined look it up
right so you know i meet a lot of people
interested in the future interested in
thinking about the future they're
thinking about how can i influence the
future but
you know overwhelmingly in history so
far the main way people have influenced
the future is by having children
overwhelmingly
and
that's just not an incidental fact you
you are built for that that is you know
you're you're the sequence of thousands
of generations each of which
successfully had a descendant and that
affected who you are
you just have to expect and it's true
that who you are is built to be
you know expect to have a child to to
you know want to have a child to have
that be a natural and meaningful
interaction for you and it's just true
it's just one of those things you just
should have expected and it's not a
surprise well uh to push back and sort
of
in terms of influencing the future
as we get more and more technology more
and more of us are able to influence the
future in all kinds of other ways right
being a teacher educating even so though
still most of our influence in the
future is probably happened being being
kids even though we've accumulated more
ways other ways to do it
you mean at scale i guess the depth of
influence like really how much of much
effort how much of yourself you really
put another human being do you mean both
the raising
of a kid or you mean raw genetic
information
well both but raw genetics is probably
more than half of it
more than half
more than half even in this modern world
yup
genetics
let me ask some dark
difficult questions if i might
let's take a stroll
into that uh place that may may not
exist
according to you
what's the darkest place you've ever
gone to in your mind in your life a dark
time a challenging time in your life
that you had to overcome
um
you know probably
just feeling strongly rejected
and so i've been i'm apparently somewhat
emotionally scarred by just being very
rejection averse which must have
happened because some rejections were
just very
scarring at a scale
in in what kinds of communities and they
did the individual scale i mean lots of
different scales yeah
all the different many different scales
still that rejection stings
um hold on a second but you are
a
contrarian thinker you challenge the
knowledge
why
if you if you were scarred by rejection
why welcome it in so many ways at a much
larger scale constantly with your ideas
could be that i'm just stupid
and
or that i've just categorized them
differently than i should or something
um
you know the most rejection
that i've faced hasn't been because of
my intellectual ideas
uh so oh so once the intellectual ideas
haven't been the thing to risk the
rejection the one that the things that
put
challenge your mind
taking you to a dark place are the more
psychological rejections
so well you just asked me well you know
what took me to a dark place you didn't
specify it as sort of an intellectual
dark place i guess yeah i just meant
like what what
so intellectual is disjoint or at least
at a at a more surface level than
something emotional
yeah i would i would just think you know
there are times in your life when you
know you're just in a dark place and
that can have many different causes and
most you know most intellectuals are
still just people and most of the things
that will affect them or the kinds of
things that affect people they aren't
that different necessarily and that's
going to be true for like i presume most
basketball players are still just people
if you ask them what was the worst part
of their life it's going to be this kind
of thing that was the worst part of life
for most people so rejection early in
life uh yeah i think i mean that's
possible
not in grade school probably but you
know yeah sort of you know being a young
nerdy guy and
feeling you know
not in much demand or interest or
you know later on
lots of different kinds of rejection but
yeah
but i think that's
you know
most of us like to pretend we don't that
much need other people we don't care
what they think uh you know it's a
common sort of stance if somebody
rejects yourself i didn't care about
them anyway i you know didn't but i
think to be honest people really do care
yeah we do seek that connection that
love what do you think is the role of
love in the human condition
um opacity in part
that is um
love is one of those things where we
know at some level it's important to us
but it's not very clearly shown to us
exactly how or why or in what ways
uh there are some kinds of things we
want where we can just clearly see that
we want and widely we want it right we
know when we're thirsty and we know why
we were thirsty and we know what to do
about being thirsty and we know when
it's over that we're no longer thirsty
love isn't like that
it's like what what do we seek from this
we're drawn to it but we do not
understand why right we're drawn exactly
because it's not
just affection because if it was just
affection we don't seem to be drawn to
pure affection
we don't seem to be drawn
to uh
somebody who's like a servant we don't
seem to be necessarily drawn to somebody
that satisfies all your needs or
something like that
so it's clearly something we want or
need but we're not exactly very clear
about it and that isn't kind of
important to it so i've also noticed
there are some kinds of things you can't
imagine very well so if you imagine a
situation there's some aspects of the
situation you can clear that you can
imagine it being bright or dim you can
imagine it being windy or imagine being
hot or cold
but there's some aspects about your
emotional stance in a situation that's
actually just hard to imagine or even
remember it's hard to like you can often
remember an emotion only when you're in
a similar sort of emotion situation and
otherwise you just can't bring the
emotion
to your mind as a and you can't even
imagine it right so there's certain
kinds of imag emotions you can have and
when you're in that emotion you can know
that you have it and you can have a name
and it's associated but later on i tell
you
you know remember joy and it does that
doesn't come to mind you're not able to
replay it right and that's the sort of
reason why we ha we're one of the
reasons that pushes us to re-consume it
and reproduce it
is that we can't reimagine it
well there's a it's interesting because
there's a daniel kahneman type of thing
of like reliving memories because
i'm able to summon some aspect of that
emotion again by thinking of that
situation that from which that emotion
came right so like a certain song you
can listen to it and you can feel the
same way you felt the first time you
remember that song associated with you
need to remember that situation in some
sort of complete package yes you can't
just take one part off of it and then if
you get the whole package again if you
remember the whole feeling yes or some
fundamental aspect of that whole
experience that arouse
from which the feeling wrote and
actually the feeling is probably
different
in some way it could be more pleasant or
less pleasant than the feeling you felt
originally and that morphs over time
every time you replay that memory it is
interesting you're not able to replay
the
because you feeling
remember the feeling you remember the
facts of the events so there's a sense
in which over time we expand our
vocabulary as a community of language
and that allows us to sort of have more
feelings and know that we are feeling
them
because you can have a feeling but not
have a word for it and then you don't
know how to categorize it or even what
it is and whether it's the same as
something else but once you have a word
for it
you can sort of pull it together more
easily and so i think over time we are
having a richer palette of
feelings because we have more words for
them
what has been a painful loss in your
life maybe somebody or something that's
no longer in your life
but played an important part of your
life youth
that's a concept no it has to be i mean
but i was once younger i had one health
and i had vitality i was seeing summer i
mean you know i've lost that over time
do you see that as a different person
maybe you've lost that person certainly
i yes absolutely i'm a different person
than i was when i was younger and i've
i'm not who i don't even remember
exactly what he was so i don't remember
as many things from the past as many
people do so and some stuff i've just
lost a lot of my history by not
remembering it but does that and i'm not
that person anymore that person's gone
is that painful
is it a painful loss though
yeah or is it a
why why is it painful because you're
wiser
you're
i mean there's so many things that are
beneficial to getting older
right but
are you just
just i just was this person and i felt
assured that i could continue to be that
person and you're no longer that and
he's he's gone and i'm not him anymore
and he's he died without fanfare or a
funeral
and that the person you are today
talking to me that person
will be changed too yes
and so that 20 years he won't be there
anymore and the future person
you have
uh will look back with each version of
you for m's this will be less of a
problem for m's they would be able to
save an archived copy of themselves at
each different age
and they could turn it on periodically
and go back and talk to it to replay
you think some of that will be
so
with emulated minds with m's
there's a clue there's a digital cloning
that happens
and
do you think that makes
your
you less special
if if you're cloneable
like does does that make you
uh
the experience of life the
experience of a moment the scarcity of
that moment the scarcity of that
experience isn't that a fundamental part
of what makes that experience so
delicious
so rich of feeling i think if you think
of a song that lots of people listen to
that are copies all over the world we're
gonna call that a more special song
yeah
so there's a perspective on copying and
cloning where you're just scaling
happiness versus uh degrading
each copy of a song is less special if
there are many copies but the song
itself is more special if there are many
copies and on mass right you're
you're actually
spreading the happiness even if it
diminishes over a large number of people
at scale and that increases the overall
happiness in the world
and then you're able to do that with
multiple songs is a person who has an
identical twin
more or less special
well
the problem with identical twins is you
know you it's like just two with m's
right but but two is different than one
so
but i think an identical twin's life is
richer for having this other identical
twin somebody who understands them
better than anybody else can
from the point of view of an identical
twin i think they have a richer life for
being part of this couple which each of
which is very similar now if you said
will the world you know if we lose one
of the identical twins will the world
miss it as much because you've got the
other one and they're pretty similar
maybe from the rest of the world's point
of view they are
they suffer less of a loss when they
lose one of the identical twins but from
the point of view of the identical twin
themselves
their life is enriched by having a twin
see but the identical twin copying
happens at the place of birth
uh that's different than copying after
you've done some of the
environment like the nurture yeah at the
teenage or the in the 20s
that'll be an interesting thing for ems
to find out all the different ways that
can have different relationships to
different people who have different
degrees of similarity to them in time
yeah
man
but it seems like a rich space to
explore and i don't feel sorry for them
this sounds like interesting world to
living and there could be some ethical
conundrums there there will be many new
choices to make that they don't make now
so and then we discussed it and i
discussed that in the book age if i'm
like
say say you have a lover and you make a
copy of yourself but the lover doesn't
make a copy well now which one of you
or are both still
related to the lover socially
entitled
would you show up
yes so you'll have to make choices then
when you split yourself which which of
you inherit which unique things
yeah and of course there will be
an equivalent
increase in lawyers well i guess you can
clone the lawyers to help
manage some of these negotiations
of how to split property the nature of
owning i mean property
is connected to individuals right you
only really need lawyers for this with
an inefficient awkward law that is not
very transparent and able to do things
so you know for example an operating
system of a computer is a law for that
computer when the operating system is
simple and clean you don't need to hire
a lawyer to make a key choice with the
operator you don't need a human in the
loop you just make a choice
yeah right so ideally we want a legal
system that
makes the common choices easy and not
require much overhead and that's the
digitization of things uh further and
further further enables that
[Music]
so the loss of a younger self
what about the loss of your life overall
do you ponder your death your mortality
are you afraid of it i am a cryonics
customer that's what this little tag
around my deck says it says that if you
find me in a medical situation uh you
should call these people
to enable the cryonics transfer so i am
taking a long shot chance at living a
much longer life
can you explain
what cryonics is so
when medical science gives up on me
in this world instead of
burning me or letting worms eat me they
will freeze me
or at least freeze my head and
there's damage that happens in the
process of freezing the head but once
it's frozen it won't change for a very
long time chemically it'll just be
completely exactly the same
so future
technology might be able to revive me
and in fact i would be mainly counting
on the brain emulation scenario
which doesn't require reviving my entire
biological body it means i would be in a
computer simulation
and so
that's i think i've got at least a five
percent shot at that
and that's immortality
are you
so
most likely it won't happen and
therefore i'm sad that it won't happen
do you think immortality is something
that you would like to have
well i mean just like infinity i mean
you can't know until
forever which means never right so all
you can really you know the better
choices at each moment you want to keep
going so i would like at every moment to
have the option to keep going
the the interesting thing about
the human experience is that
the way you phrase it is exactly right
at every moment i would like to keep
going
but the thing that happens
uh
you know
leave them wanting more of whatever that
uh right that phrase is the thing that
happens is over time
uh it's possible for certain experiences
to become bland
and you become tired of them and that
actually
makes life um
really unpleasant
sorry it makes that experience really
unpleasant and perhaps you can
generalize that that to life itself if
you have a long enough horizon and so it
might happen but we might as well wait
and find out but then you're ending it
and suffering
you know so
in the world of brain emulations i have
more options
you can return yourself that is i i can
make copies of myself archive copies at
various ages
and at a later age i could decide that
i'd rather replace myself with a new
copy from a younger age
so does a brain emulation
still operate in the physical space so
can we do what do you think about like
the metaverse and operating in virtual
reality so we can conjure up not just
emulate not just your own um
brain and body but the entirety of the
environment well most brain emulations
will in fact spose most of their time in
virtual reality but they wouldn't think
of it as virtual reality or just think
of it as their usual reality
i mean the thing to notice i think in
our world most of us spend time most
time indoors
and indoors we are surrounded by
walls covered with paint and floors
covered with tile or rugs
most of our environment is artificial
it's constructed to be convenient for us
it's not the natural world that was
there before a virtual reality is
basically just like that it is the
environment that's comfortable and
convenient for you
and but if if when it's the right that
environment for you it's real for you
just like the room you're in right now
most likely is very real for you you're
not
focused on the fact that the paint is
hiding the actual studs behind the wall
and the actual wires and pipes and
everything else
the fact that we're hiding that from you
doesn't make it fake or unreal
what are the chances
that we're actually in the very kind of
system that you're describing where the
the environment and the brain is being
emulated and you're just replaying an
experience when you or first
did a podcast with lex
after and now you know the person that
originally launched this already did
hundreds of podcasts with lex this is
just the first time and you like this
time because there's so much uncertainty
there's nerves you could have gone any
direction
um at the moment we don't have the
technical ability to create
that an emulation so we'd have to be
postulating that in the future we have
that ability and then they choose to
evaluate this moment now no but to
simulate it don't you think we're we
could be in the simulation of that exact
experience right now we wouldn't be able
to know
so
one scenario would be this never really
happened this only happens as a
reconstruction later on yeah that's
different than scenario this did happen
the first time and now it's happening
again as a reconstruction
second scenario is harder to put
together because it requires this
coincidence where between the two times
we produce the ability to do it
um no but don't you think replay of
memories uh um poor replay
of memories is
so that might be a possible thing in the
future saying it's harder than conjure
up things from scratch
it's certainly possible so the main way
i would think about it is in terms of
the demand for simulation versus other
kinds of things so i've given this a lot
of thought because you know i first
wrote about this long ago when bostrom
first wrote his papers about simulation
argument and i wrote about how to live
in a simulation
um
and
so the key issue is
you know the fraction of creatures in
the universe that are really
experiencing what you appear to be
really experiencing relative to the
fraction that are experiencing it in a
simulation way i.e simulated so
then
the key parameter is at any one moment
in time
creatures at that time many of them most
of them are presumably really
experiencing what they're experiencing
but some fraction of them are
experiencing some past time
where that past time is being remembered
via their simulation
so um
to figure out this ratio what we need to
think about is basically
two functions one is how fast in time
does the number of creatures grow
and then how fast in time does the
interest in the past decline
because at any one time people will be
simulating different periods in the past
with different emphasis
the way you think so much
that's exactly right yeah so
if if the first function grows slower
then the second one declines
then in fact your chances of being
simulated
are low
yes so the key question is how fast does
interest in the past decline relative to
the rate at which the population grows
with time does this correlate to you
earlier suggested that the interest in
the future increases over time
are those correlated interests in the
future versus interest in the past like
why do why are we interested in the past
but the simple way to do is as you know
like google engrams has a way to type in
a word and see how interested in client
declines arises over time right yeah you
can just type in a year and get the
answer for that if you type in a
particular year like 1900
or 1950 you can see with google engram
how interest in that year
increased up until that date and
decreased after it yep and you can see
that interest in a date declines faster
than does the population grow with time
that is brilliant
and so that's so interesting to have the
answer
wow
and that was your argument against
not against this particular aspect of
the simulation how much
past simulation there will be
a replay of past memories first of all
if we assume that like simulation of the
past is a small fraction of all the
creatures at that moment yes right
and then it's about how fast now some
people have argued plausibly that maybe
most
interest in the past falls with this
fast function but some unusual category
of interest in the fast won't fall that
fat quickly and then that eventually
would dominate so that's a other
hypothesis some category so that that
very outlier specific kind of yeah okay
yeah yeah yeah like really popular
kinds of memories like
second probably second in a trillion
years there's some small research
institute that tries to randomly select
from all possible people in history yeah
yeah
yeah yeah how big is this research
institute and how big is the future in a
trillion years right and that's that
would be hard to say but if we just look
at the ordinary process by which people
simulate recent
errors so if you look at well i think
it's also true for movies and plays and
video games overwhelming they're
interested in the recent past
there's very few video games where you
play someone in the roman empire right
even fewer where you play someone in the
ancient egyptian empire
yeah just indifferent it's just declined
very quickly but every once in a while
that's brought back
um but yeah you're right i mean just if
you look at the mass of entertainment
movies and games it's it's focusing on
the present recent past and maybe some i
mean where does science fiction fit into
this because
um it's sort of uh
uh what is science fiction i mean it's a
mix of the past and the present and some
kind of manipulation of that right to uh
make it more efficient for us to ask
deep philosophical questions about
humanity the closest genre to science
fiction is clearly fantasy fantasy and
science fiction many bookstores and even
netflix or whatever categories they're
just lumped together
so clearly they have a similar function
so that the function of fantasy is more
transparent than the function of science
fiction so use that as your guide
what's fantasy for it's just
to take away the constraints of the
ordinary world and imagine stories with
much fewer constraints right that's what
fantasy is you're much less constrained
what's the purpose to remove constraints
is it to escape
from the harshness of the constraints of
the real world or is it to just remove
constraints in order to explore some
some get a deeper understanding of our
world
what is it i mean why do people read i'm
not a i'm not a
a cheap fantasy reading kind of person
so i need to uh
one story that sounds plausible to me is
that there are sort of these
deep story structures that we
love and we want to realize and then
many details of the world get in their
way
fantasy takes all those obstacles out of
the way and lets you tell the essential
hero story or the essential love story
whatever essential story you want to
tell um the the reality and constraints
are not in the way
and so science fiction can be thought of
as like fantasy except you're not
willing to admit that it's not can't be
true so the future gives the excuse of
saying well it could happen
and you accept some more reality
constraints for the for the illusion at
least that it maybe it could really
happen
maybe it could happen and that it
stimulates the image the imagination
is something really interesting about
human beings
and it seems also to be an important
part of creating really special things
is to be able to first imagine them uh
with you and nick bostrom
where do you land on the simulation and
all the
mathematical ways of thinking it and
just the thought experiment of it are we
living in a simulation
that was the just discussion we just had
that is you should grant the possibility
of being a simulation you shouldn't be
100 confident that you're not you should
certainly grant a small probability the
question is how large is that
probability oh you're saying we would be
i i misunderstood because i thought our
discussion was about replaying things
that already happened right but the
whole question is
right now is that what's what i am
am i actually a replay from some distant
future but it doesn't necessarily need
to be a replay it could be a totally new
you could be you don't have to be right
but clearly i'm in a certain era with a
certain kind of world around me right so
either this is a complete fantasy or
it's a past of somebody else in the
future
but
no it could be a complete fantasy though
it could be right but then you might and
then you have to talk about what's the
frank fraction of complete fantasies
right
i would say it's easier to generate a
fantasy than to replay a memory right
sure just look at the entire
we just look at the entire history of
everything we should say sure but most
things are real most things aren't
fantasies right therefore the chance
that my thing is real right so so the
simulation argument works stronger about
sort of the past we say ah but there's
more future people than there are today
so you being in the past of the future
makes you special relative to them which
makes you more likely to be in a
simulation right if we're just taking
the full count and saying in all
creatures ever what percentage are in
simulations probably no more than 10
see so what's the good argument for that
that most things are real yeah because
foster says the other way right
in a competitive world in a world where
people like have to work
and have to get things done then they
have a limited budget for
leisure
and so
you know leisure things are less common
than work things like real things right
that that's just
but if you look at the stretch of
history in the universe
doesn't the ratio
of leisure increase
i
is that where we isn't that the fourth
right but now we're looking at the
fraction of leisure which takes the form
of something where the person doing the
leisure doesn't realize it now there
could be some fraction that's much
smaller right
yeah okay
clues forward
or somebody is clueless in the process
of supporting this this leisure right it
might not be the person leisuring
somebody they're a supporting character
or something but still that's got to be
a pretty small fraction of leisure
what you mentioned that children are one
of the things that are a source of
meaning
broadly speaking then let me ask the big
question what's the meaning of this
whole thing
the robin meaning of life what is the
meaning of life
we talked about alien civilizations
but this is the one we got we are the
aliens we are the human
seem to be conscious be able to
introspect
what's why why why are we here this is
the thing i told you before about how we
can predict that future creatures will
be different from us
we
our preferences are this amalgam of
various sorts of random sort of patched
together
preferences about thirst and sex and
sleep
and attention and all these sorts of
things
so
we don't understand that very well it's
not very transparent and it's a mess
right
that is the source of our motivation
that is how we were made and how we are
induced to do things but we can't
summarize it very well and we don't even
understand it very well that's who we
are and often we find ourselves in a
situation where we don't feel very
motivated we don't know why in other
situations we find ourselves very
motivated and we don't know why either
and so that's the nature of being a
human of the sort that we are because
even though we can think abstractly and
reason abstractly this package of
motivations is just opaque and a mess
and that's what it means to be a human
today and the motivation
we can't very well tell the meaning of
our life it is this mess that our
descendants will be different they will
actually know exactly what they want
and it will be to have more descendants
for that will be the meaning for them
well it's funny that you have the
certainty you have more certainty you
have more transparency about our
descendants than you do about your own
self right so
um
it's really interesting to think because
you mentioned this about love
that
something
that's fundamental about love is this
opaqueness that we're not able to really
introspect what the heck it is
um
or all the feelings the complex feelings
involved true about many of our
motivations and that's what it means to
be human of the 20
20th and the 21st century variety
um why is that not a feature that we
want
will choose to persist
in civilization then this opaqueness you
know put another way
mystery maintaining a sense of mystery
about ourselves and about those around
us
uh maybe that's a really nice thing to
have
maybe but so i mean this is the
fundamental issue and
analyzing the future what will set the
future
one theory about what will set the
future is
what do we want the future to be
so under that theory we should sit and
talk about what we went to future we
have some conferences have some
conventions you know discussion things
vote on it maybe and then hand out off
to the implementation people to make the
future the way we've decided it should
be
that's not the actual process that's
changed the world over history up to
this point it has not been the result of
us deciding what we want and making it
happen
in our individual lives we can do that
and we might decide what career we want
or where we want to live who we want to
live with in our individual lives we
often do
slowly make our lives better according
to our plan and our things but that's
not the whole world
the whole world so far has mostly been a
competitive world where things happen if
anybody anywhere chooses to adopt them
and they have an advantage and then it
spreads and other people are forced to
adopt it by competitive pressures
so that's the kind of analysis i can use
to predict the future and i do use that
to predict the future it doesn't tell us
it'll be a future we like it just tells
us what it'll be
and it'll be one where we're trying to
maximize the number of our descendants
and we know that abstractly indirectly
and it's not opaque with some
probability that's non-zero that will
lead us to become grabby
in
expanding
aggressively out into the cosmos until
we meet other aliens the timing isn't
clear we might become glabby and then
this happens these are
grubbiness and this are both the results
of competition but it's less clear which
happens first
does this future excite you or scare you
how do you feel about this well i think
again i told you compared to sort of a
dead cosmology at least it it's
energizing and having a living story
with real actors and characters and
agendas right
yeah and that's one one hell of a fun
universe to live in robin you're one of
the most fascinating fun people to talk
to brilliant
humble
systematic in your analysis hold on to
my wallet here what's he looking for i
already stole your wallet long ago i
really really appreciate you spend your
valuable time with me i hope we get a
chance to talk
many more times in the future thank you
so much for sitting down thank you
thanks for listening to this
conversation with robin hansen to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from ray bradbury
we are an impossibility in an impossible
universe
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you