Increments

Vaden manages to penetrate deep into the rationalist stronghold in San Francisco, the Mecca of Yudkowsky himself, and - exactly as we'd all expect - gets into an epistemological standoff. Can he shake a Bayesian's credence in Bayesianism, or does he find in himself a Jaynesian acolyte, ready to make sure that no Dutchman is going to be able to mess with his books?

We discuss

• Critical rationalism vs. Bayesianism
• Toby Ord's doom estimates
• Asteroids vs. AI risk
• What probabilities measure
• Comparing made-up numbers
• Is probability a law?
• Cox's theorem and Dutch books
• COVID models and Monte Carlo
• AI expert surveys
• How we actually decide
• Bentham's Bulldog and Pascal's mugging
• Animal consciousness and vegetarianism
• Strong longtermism

References

• I Have Lost My Ability to be Charitable to Vaden (Eneasz Brodsky, Death Is Bad)
• The Bayesian Conspiracy ep. 273, "Vaden Masrani on... Critical Rationalism?"
• Death Is Bad, Eneasz's blog
• The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast
• Learning Bayesian Statistics ep. 160, "Bayesian Statistics vs Epistemology" (Alexandre Andorra with Vaden Masrani)
• Is P(Doom) Meaningful? Epistemology Debate with Vaden Masrani and Ben Chugg (Doom Debates, Liron Shapira; also Increments bonus ep. 76)
• Vaden's four-part longtermism series:

• A Case Against Strong Longtermism: A response to Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill (EA Forum version)
• Proving Too Much: A response to the EA forum
• The Credence Assumption: The paradoxes and problems with Cox's Theorem
• The Poverty of Longtermism: Why longtermism isn't an idea that could save one hundred billion trillion lives

Books and papers

• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord)
• The Case for Strong Longtermism (Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill) (GPI summary)
• Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (Vaclav Smil, MIT Press, 2008)
• Conjectures and Refutations (Karl Popper)
• The Scout Mindset (Julia Galef)

What's your P(Vaden is Bad Faith)? Send your credence, and only your credence, over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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Vaden has been annoyed about the Hugging Face incident for weeks, and the only known cure is yelling
about it on the podcast. Ben, who as usual is more even-headed and objective about the incident (incidentally, he also writes the episode descriptions) plays devil's advocate. Was there ever really a sandbox? Did the agents cheat, or did they just do what they were told? Is terrifying the public good for an IPO? Multiple analogies enter the fray, zero minds are changed, and Saturday Night Live gets the last word.

We discuss

• What actually happened in the Hugging Face incident (and what is ExploitGym?)
• What Project Glasswing and Mythos already told us about AI and cybersecurity
• Is a sandbox with Artifactory access still a sandbox?
• Did the agents cheat, or just follow their prompt?
• Negligence, PR stunt, or both? Going through OpenAI's timeline
• How independent is an "independent" investigation?
• Does anthropomorphic language help you predict what AI will do?
• Grenades, knives, and yogurt: parenting styles for package managers

References

• The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead (OpenAI blog post): https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
• OpenAI's technical report on the incident (PDF): https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c7814c/OpenAI-Hugging-Face%20Incident-Technical-Report.pdf
• Making Sense #494, "A Coin Toss for the Future" (Sam Harris with Ryan Greenblatt): https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/494-a-coin-toss-for-the-future
• Redwood Research on the incident: https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/the-openaihuggingface-incident-redwood
• Dwarkesh Podcast with Ajeya Cotra, "Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X50zezLFWWI&pp=ygUVZHdhcmtlc2ggaHVnZ2luZyBmYWNl
• Melanie Mitchell, "Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks": https://aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading-metaphors-and-real-risks
• Anthropic's Project Glasswing: https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
• JFrog Artifactory: https://jfrog.com/artifactory/

• Our episode with Melanie Mitchell: https://www.incrementspodcast.com/45

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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At 3am, tossing and turning in your bed, have you ever wondered why this generation is full of a bunch of fragile sissies? Journalist Abigail Shrier has, and her answer is: Therapy. Too much God d*** therapy. Is she right? Ben and Vaden read her 2024 book on the subject, Bad Therapy, and discuss it, including the good, the bad, and the preposterous footnotes.

Buy the book here https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593542924 and check out the rest of Shrier's work here https://www.abigailshrier.com/.

We discuss

• Iatrogenesis and whether there are negative side effects of therapy
• Why overly focusing on your feelings can lead to unhappiness
• Should kids be asked about suicidal ideation?
• Some problems with Shrier's analysis
• For God's sale, are kids fragile, or are they not?

References

• Bad Therapy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593542924
• Irreversible Damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_Damage
• Dr. K's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/HealthyGamerGG
• Part 1 of Decoding the Gurus series on Dr K: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/dr-k-part-1-oped-ayurvedic-medicine-vs-nerfed-western-allopathy
• Let Grow: https://letgrow.org/

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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After Jason Arday, the second biggest topic of conversation has of course been the rise of the neuro-grifting guru. And for good reason! Neuroscience has been causing confusion lately. What is the hippocampus up to in there? Is your pre-post-medial-cerebrum-corta-bellum even working properly? What does neuroscience say about whether you should start each day with a slap in the face?

Being incapable of answering these questions ourselves, we're bringing on bonafide neuroscientist and substacker Tommy Blanchard to help us navigate this terrain. Check out Tommy's website and substack, Cognitive Wonderland.

We discuss

• Models of decision-making in neuroscience
• The common currency model
• What do we actually know about the brain?
• What constitutes an explanation in neuroscience?
• What neuroscience is put on a pedestal
• Neuro-grifting Gurus, aka Huberman et al.

References

• Tommy's post about his research appearing in the NY Times: https://cognitivewonderland.substack.com/p/scientists-hope-gambling-monkeys

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Which area of your brain lights up when you consider sending an email to incrementspodcast@gmail.com?

Special Guest: Tommy Blanchard.

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We've spent a long time bashing Bayesian epistemology on the podcast. Unfortunately, this is sometimes taken to mean that we bash all things Bayesian. But our God-fearing listeners will be pleased to learn that we do not bash all things that the Reverend Thomas Bayes stood for. Bayesian statistics, when appropriately separated from epistemology, has many things to teach us. And instead of taking our word for it, we're bringing on an expert in this field: Alex Andorra, a research scientist at Meta and host of the Learning Bayesian Statistics podcast. The Gods Smile.

Check out Alex's website and the Learning Bayesian statistics podcast.

We discuss

• 538 and election forecasting
• Sports analytics and why Messi is objectively the best
• What is Bayesian statistics?
• What is the difference between Bayesian and frequentist statistics?
• What is the allure of Bayesian statistics?
• Are priors best thought of as beliefs?
• How do critical rationalists make decisions?

References

• Learning Bayesian Statistics: https://learnbayesstats.com/
• Silver Bulletin: https://www.natesilver.net/
• Vaden's blog post on decision making: https://vmasrani.github.io/blog/2020/vaden_second_response/#what-other-options-to-decision-theory-are-there # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @alex_andorra, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Send us an email because you have - no, because you want to - over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Alex Andorra.

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It's only taken us 104 episodes of talking incessantly about Karl Popper to get one of the most important and popular criticisms of falsification: The Duhem-Quine thesis. Should we wrap the podcast here? Is it game over?

We discuss

• Does AI need more economic thinking?
• The role of background knowledge in conversation
• The allure of verificationism
• The Duhem-Quine thesis
• The role of competing theories in combatting the thesis
• Are conspiracies the price we pay for independent thinking?

References

• Michael I. Jordan on ML Street Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AREWYbVtX64
• Our conversation with Ben Recht: https://www.incrementspodcast.com/91

Quotes

People involved in a fruitful critical discussion of a problem often rely, if only unconsciously, upon two things: the acceptance by all parties of the common aim of getting at the truth, or at least nearer to the truth, and a considerable amount of common background knowledge. This does not mean that either of these two things is an indispensable basis of every discussion, or that these two things are themselves ‘a priori’, and cannot be critically discussed in their turn. It only means that criticism never starts from nothing, even though every one of its starting points may be challenged, one at a time, in the course of the critical debate.
- C&R, Chap 10

While discussing a problem we always accept (if only temporarily) all kinds of things as unproblematic: they constitute for the time being, and for the discussion of this particular problem, what I call our background knowledge. Few parts of this background knowledge will appear to us in all contexts as absolutely unproblematic, and any particular part of it may be challenged at any time, especially if we suspect that its uncritical acceptance may be responsible for some of our difficulties. But almost all of the vast amount of background knowledge which we constantly use in any informal discussion will, for practical reasons, necessarily remain unquestioned; and the misguided attempt to question it all—that is to say, to start from scratch—can easily lead to the breakdown of a critical debate. (Were we to start the race where Adam started, I know of no reason why we should get any further than Adam did.)
- C&R, Chap 10

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Did you ever see the video of two regular people trying to fight Eddie Hall, the strongest man on earth? Ben and Vaden bring that same energy to this conversation, where they gang up on Robert Wright on the subject of his forthcoming book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. Bob is a sport about it (well, there was no choice really: we have an advanced copy of his book that we're holding hostage) and there are only one or two black eyes by the end.

Subscribe to Robert Wright's podcasting empire NonZero on youtube and substack. And go buy one of his many books.

We discuss

• Whether Bob was the OG podcaster
• Is there a directionality to evolution?
• Where Bob is on the AI fear and awe spectrum
• Whether LLMs have decoded the meaning in language
• Is AI best viewed as a tool or as superintelligence?
• AI-as-slingshot analogy

References

• The God Test by Robert Wright
• Nonzero by Robert Wright
• William Paley and his pocket watch
• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins
• Our conversation with Scott Aaronson

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @RobertWrighter, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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What's the directionality of this podcast? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Robert Wright.

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Turning on our own! Vaden sits down with Bruce Nielson and Peter Johansen to discuss some of the bad memes that run rampant in the online "crit-rat" community, in an attempt of some intra-tribal error-correction. Ben, scared of the retribution, runs away with his tail uncomfortably close to his thighs.

Follow Bruce and Peter's work on the Theory of Anything Podcast.

Sign up for the Theory of Anything podcast Patreon here, and Check out Peter's Many World of David Deutsch facebook group here.

We discuss

• Bruce and Peter's origin stories
• Anarcho-capitalism and its (pseudo) connections to Popperian philosophy
• CritRat disbelief in mental illness
• What does the Universal Explainer hypothesis imply about mental illness and IQ?
• Is Anarcho-capitalism a foundationalist and utopian philosophy?

• Why are so many crit-rats Trump supporters?

See Also

• Theory of Anything Podcast #136: Michael Golding on Mental Illness
• Theory of Anything Podcast #82: Popper's Ratchet

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani, @bnielson01
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I before E except after B? Send your best guess as to the spelling of Bruce's last name (no one knows) over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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Wasn't Popper a falsificationist? Then why did he try to develop ideas about corroboration and versimilitude - the extent to which a theory was closer to truth than another theory? Isn't this verging dangerously close to verificationist territory?

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

We discuss

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

Quotes

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

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

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

- C&R, page 315

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

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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How many chromosomes does diethyl-methyl pentophosphate have, exactly? Tell as at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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100 episodes! To celebrate, Vaden tries to get personal with Ben, while Ben dodges his questions and wants to know how Vaden feels about incest. All in all, a pretty typical episode.

The questions

From Vaden to Ben:

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

From Ben to Vaden:

• How do you feel about looksmaxxing?
• Thoughts on medical assistance in dying?
• Ethics of Alex Honnold free soloing Taipei 101?
• Thoughts on Nation-Buiding?
• Incest - into it?

Episode References

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

References

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

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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What is your favorite form of ince... actually nevermind, too much. Just email us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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Ben is hesitant to talk too much about politics on the podcast. So, naturally, we're having a political debate. We have on a pseudonymous guest to talk Trump, MAGA, and what's wrong with the left and the right.

We discuss

• Trump's politics as trial and error
• The dynamics of MAGA
• ICE activity in Minnesota
• Illegal immigration
• Would Popper have supported Trump?
• What does "incrementalism" mean in politics?

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Cross the border into the increments discord and hit us up at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

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"What is Truth?", said jesting podcasters, who then stuck around for an answer. Back at it again with The Conjectures and Refutations Series (part three) on Chapter 10: Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Can we say what truth is, even if we can never be certain we've found it? If not, can we say that science is approaching truth? How would we ever know? And why are so many theories of truth untrue?

We discuss

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

References

• Daniel Bonevac on the Correspondence theory of truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlG_VaN1LHQ

• Tarki's 1944 paper on the semantic conception of truth
• Tarki's 1933 paper "On the concept of truth in formalized languages"
• Deutsch's 2022 talk on truth: Musings about Truth # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Two years without discussing effective altruism -- did you miss it? Not as much as Vaden, surely. And probably a right bit more than Ben.

Well, we're back in the game with a spicy one. Was EA a front for AI safety from the beginning? Did the leaders care not a wit for global poverty? Is Ben going to throw himself out window if Vaden keeps this up?

We discuss

• Feedback on our introspection episode
• The motives of the EA founders
• The felicia forum
• Is this a conspiracy theory?

• EA's strategic ambiguity
• Bostromism, transhumanism, and AI safety
• EA funding
• The public/core divide and the funnel model

Quotes

new effective altruists tend to start off concerned about global poverty or animal suffering and then hear, take seriously, and often are convinced by the arguments for existential risk mitigation
- Will MacAskill

Existential risk isn’t the most useful public face for effective altruism – everyone inc[l]uding Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees about that
- Scott Alexander, 2015

Utilitymonster: GWWC is explicitly poverty-focused but high impact careers (HIC) is not. In fact, hardcore members of GWWC are heavily interested in x-risk, and I estimate that 10-15% of its general membership is as well. I’d take them seriously as a group for promoting utilitarianism in general.
I’m a GWWC leader.
[Redacted]: but HIC always seems to talk about things in terms of “lives saved”, ive never heard them mentioning other things to donate to. […]
Utilitymonster: That’s exactly the right thing for HIC to do. Talk about lives saved with their public face, let hardcore members hear about x-risk, and then, in the future, if some excellent x-risk opportunity arises, direct resources to x-risk.
- From felicia forum.

References

• Gleiberman's paper: https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/files/8518/61565cb6-e056-4e35-bd2e-d14d58e35231.pdf
• Old EA wikipedia page (web archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20170409171350/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
• Old CEA webpage (web archive): https://web.archive.org/web/20161219031827/https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/fundraising/

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Happy Christmas and Merry Festivus y'all! Today we're releasing a patreon episode, as both of us are away on vacation with the family for the holidays. In this episode we have a meandering discussion about parenting, Robert Kegan's four stages of development, the limits of introspection, and relationship counseling.

We discuss

• Advice for new fathers
• Vaden comes out to the world (about snowboarding)
• Robert Kegan's four stages of development
• The limits of introspection
• Countertransference
• The show Couples Therapy with Dr. Orna Guralnik # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Introspect a little, and tell us why you haven't signed up to our Patreon feed over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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After a long hiatus where we both saw grief counsellors over our fight about Popper's theory of content in the last C&R episode, we are back. And we're ready to play nice ... for about 30 seconds until Vaden admits that two sentences from Popper changed his mind about something Ben had arguing for literally years.

But eventually putting those disagreements aside, we return to the subject at hand: The Conjectures and Refutations Series: Chapter 10: Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Part II). Here all goes smoothly. Just kidding, we start fighting about content again almost immediately. Where are the guests to break us up when you need them.

We discuss

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

Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Socials

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• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
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Is "Ben and Vaden will fight about content" high or low probability? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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The time has come for Vaden to defend his faith in the face of cold, hard scientific rationality. Will AI take over the world, automating away everything that makes humans distinct? Or can Vaden defend the church of just-ism, the radical belief that AI is simply "just a tool." Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at UT Austin, goes to head to head against the zealotry.

Check out Scott's website and his blog, Shtetl Optimized.

We discuss

• Scott view's on education. Should we radically reform K-12?
• Is ChatGPT changing Scott's approach to teaching
• The religion of "justa-ism"
• Is AI just a tool?
• Is there any principle which lets us say that AI won't be as general as humans?
• Aaronson's thesis of Artificial Intelligence
• Computational universality vs explanatory universality
• The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
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Have you been converted? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Scott Aaronson.

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Back to basics baby. We're doing a couple introductory episodes on Popper's philosophy of science, following Chapter 10 of Conjectures and Refutations. We start with Popper's theory of content: what makes a good scientific theory? Can we judge some theories as better than others before we even run any empirical tests? Should we be looking for theories with high probability?

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

We discuss

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

Quotes

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

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

• C&R p. 291

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

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

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

• C&R p.294

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

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

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

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

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

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

• C&R p.295

Socials

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How much content does the theory "dish soap is the ultimate face cleanser" have? Send your order of infinity over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

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We're joined by Jonathan Rauch to discuss what it means to be a radical incrementalist, how to foment revolution on geological timescales, and whether Christianity can be a force for good in politics. Can Jon convince angry-Hitchens-atheist Vaden that Christianity has some benefits? Will both Vaden and Ben be at Sunday prayer?

Follow Jonathan on his website, at Brookings, at The Atlantic or on Bluesky.

We discuss

• The constitution of knowledge and whether it's holding
• Norms vs laws, and whether we should introduce more laws to codify norms
• Popper's paradox of tolerance
• How should liberals respond to illiberalism? Which tactics, if any, should democrats adopt from MAGA to fight MAGA?

• Sharp Christianity and Christian nationalism
• Rauch's plea to Christians

References

• The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
• Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy

Errata

Jonathan Rauch is the author of nine books, not eight!

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @JonRauch, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Anyone in Canada have a basement suite Jonathan could rent for a while? Send your address over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Jonathan Rauch.

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Professor of electrical engineering and computer science Ben Recht joins us to defend Bayesianism, AI doom, and assure us that the statisticians have everything under control.

Just kidding. Recht might be even more suspicious of these things than we are. What has statistics ever done for us, really? When was the last time YOU ran a clinical trial after all, huh? HUH? After Ben Chugg defends his life decision to do a PhD in statistics, we talk AI, cults, philosophy, Paul Meehl, and discuss Ben Recht's forthcoming book, The Irrational Decision.

Check out Ben's blog, website, and his story about machine learning.

We discuss

• Ben Recht's theory of blogging
• Why is Berkeley the epicenter of AI doom?

• Where the word "robot" came from
• Is Bayesian reasoning responsible for AI doom?
• Paul Meehl and his contributions to science
• Ben Recht's bureaucratic theory of statistics
• What on earth is null hypothesis testing?
• What is the point of statistics?
• "Sweet spots" and "small worlds"
• Does science proceed by Popperian means?
• Can Popper get around the Duhem-Quine problem?

Errata

The z-score for the Pfizer trial was 20, not 12!

References

• Argmin, Ben Recht's blog
• David Freedman, UC Berkeley
• Paul Meehl's online course
• Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology, Paul Meehl's 1978 paper.
• Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence, by Meehl
• On the near impossibility of estimating the returns to advertising
• A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics by Recht
• The new riddle of induction by Goodman
• Announcing the Irrational Decision
• Patterns, Predictions, and Actions, textbook by Ben Recht and Moritz Hardt

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @BeenWrekt, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
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What's Berkeley's next cult? Send your guess over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Special Guest: Ben Recht.

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Always the uncool kids at the table, Ben and Vaden push back against the AGI hype domininating every second episode of every second podcast. We react to "We're not ready for superintelligence" by 80,000 Hours - a bleak portrayal of the pre and post AGI world. Can Ben keep Vaden's sass in check? Can the 80,000 hours team find enough cubes for AGI? Is Agent-5 listening to you RIGHT NOW?

Listener Note:

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

We discuss

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

References

• Michael I Jordan
• Neil Lawrence

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

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

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

Episode header image from here.

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