The Theory of Anything

This week Bruce makes the case that Cox’s theorem is worth taking seriously, even by Critical Rationalists. Cox’s theorem is a mathematical argument from 1946 that attempts to show that when we judge comparison of theories (or beliefs) by reasonably consistent principles, then probabilities can be applied. Furthermore, these probabilities can be expressed as Bayesian probability.

Put more plainly, Cox's theorem proves that rationally choosing between theories, however you go about it, necessarily takes the form of the probability calculus.

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This week we discuss cosmic horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s philosophic work, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race. This book is a masterful case for pessimism and anti-natalism.

To Ligotti, consciousness is a tragic mistake, we have no free will, and the only way we can get through this life is to life to our ourselves about reality, which is akin to participating in this conspiracy. Culture, religion, art, and most of what humans do are elaborate illusions to keep us from seeing the dark truth about existence and suffering. Bruce and Peter desperately employ optimistic arguments from Tipler and Deutsch to poke holes in this compelling and seemingly rational naturalistic worldview.

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Critical Rationalists say Bayesians just make up numbers and call it science. They're not wrong — about most of them.

But in this episode, we walk through several startling counterexamples to that very charge. How do we account for those? Doesn't that imply some Bayesians are sometimes getting something very right? Should Critical Rationalists accept the good parts of Bayesianism and reject the bad? And do Critical Rationalists actually solve the problem of "making crap up," or do they just relocate it somewhere else?

Bruce argues that the real fight isn't with AI doomers like Yudkowsky — it's with the actual father of Bayesianism, E.T. Jaynes. You're in for a real fight now!

Welcome to the heavyweight epistemology match.

This is the first episode in a multi-part series.

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This week Bruce discusses a possible improvement to Pascal’s Wager: If believing in God makes your life legitimately better, is it better to believe on those grounds alone? And what does this have to do with the fun criteria and anarcho capitalism?

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This week Bruce asks more hard questions: Is our legal system “decisionalist”? In other words, are we outcome-based rather than reasoning-based creatures? Is there something deep in our brains they tells us to go with what feels correct, even if we are Supreme Court justices? Is our reasoning mostly de facto when we are really honest with ourselves? Does a careful look at the state of the critical discussion really help us decide between theories, especially in politics and morality?

This episode is a review of Justin Driver’s The Insignificance of Judicial Opinions. Driver argues that when it comes to judicial opinions, it is the decisions that matter, not the reasoning used to justify them. But if that’s true, doesn’t it raise a deeper problem for the critical rationalist idea that explanatory power is king?

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What Bruce has called the “put up or shut up principle” is the idea we should want our theories to take on the burden of explanation as must as we can. We need to "put up" an at least equally content filled theory as a competitor to another content filled theory. He argues that this may be central idea behind critical rationalism. We strengthen our theories by increasing the potential set of falsifiers. This is how knowledge grows. Bruce is pointing out that we all like to change the goal post when we look at our own pet theories. But shouldn’t we strive to not have double standards if we care about moving towards truth?

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This week Bruce takes a deep dive into Pascal’s Wager. If there is even a small chance that God exists, and believing could lead to an infinite reward while disbelief risks an infinite loss, then believing is the rational choice... right?

Blaise Pascal was one of the founders of probability theory back in the 17th century. Even aside from the potentially problematic theological point his famous wager makes, it also raises important questions about probability theory, Bayes’ theorem, and even modern Bayesian epistemology. How do we handle situations where the potential payoff is enormous—or even infinite?

Pascal's Wager is also the thread we pull that unravels Bayesian Epistemology, while also showing why Bayesian Reasoning is really part of Critical Rationalism.

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This week we talk about meaning memes, words, concepts, and conceptual leakage. How is a meaning meme turned into a broader concept and then a theory? What is the role of language in this process?

And what is conceptual leakage? And why does it make it difficult to communicate to others?

And was Popper right to eschew questions of meaning? And what does this have to do with AGI?

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Bruce returns to AGI through the lens of a critical rationalist debate about whether or not AGI is theoretically possible. Can human intelligence be replicated? Is this a physics question or a biology question? Is our universe and our minds like a compact disc or like a vinyl record?

But really, Bruce is just using the AGI debate to explore an epistemological idea: that the state of a critical discussion is objective. If two people disagree about the state of a critical discussion, at least one of them must be misunderstanding that state—possibly both of them. It’s possible they are genuinely disagreeing over something factual, but more often than not they are really just disagreeing over epistemology.

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Is so-called "self-deception" a real thing? How can one at once be aware that something is true and yet also be unaware of it? Is it even a coherent concept? Doesn't deception require at least two entities—the deceived and the deceiver? Can "self-deception" be explained as something much simpler, namely deception?

Bruce summarizes his views on self-deception, moralizing, and dogmatism from a critical rationalist perspective, as well as it's relevance for AGI, "Super Intelligences", and human dogmatism.

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This week we are joined for the 4th time by physicist Sam Kuypers. From his Conjecture Institute profile: “Quantum physicist, interested in foundational questions. In his research, published in reputable scientific journals, he explores the quantum theory of time, the many-worlds interpretation, and locality.”We discuss: Is probability theory true? Is it useful? What is the connection between probability theory and physics? Does the many worlds interpretation make probability theory more true or less true?

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Ad hoc saves and immunizing stratagems are phrases Karl Popper used to describe moves humans make when we try to protect our theories from refutation. We all do this every day in one way or another.

But immunizing stratagems hurts theories in that this move makes our ideas overall less convincing to other people. Marxism and psychoanalysis are the classic areas where Popper saw true believers bend over backward to save these theories from refutation from the real world.

This was the main topic of The Myth of the Closed Mind by Ray Scott Percival, who we interviewed a few episodes ago. So when ideas come into contact with human minds, theories or memes that move us closer to truth have a survival advantage. So as flawed as we are, humans—all humans—cannot help but seek truth, fallibly of course.

Bruce reads a lot from Ray’s book on this episode, especially from chapter 4, “Ideologies as Shapeshifters.”

Please consider ordering Ray’s excellent book, which is also available on Audible.

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This week we talk about doomers, specifically AI doomers. Why has it become such a popular notion, especially amongst those who consider themselves the most rational kinds of people, that this kind of apocalypse, amongst others, is imminent? What assumptions are behind this pessimistic assertion?

This episode was actually entirely unplanned. We started recording another episode and got off on to this tangent and thought it was a fun topic.

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Bruce has made a controversial claim on this show: today's "CritRats" (Critical Rationalists on X) have drifted from what Popper intended. And surprisingly, some of the drift traces back to David Deutsch's reinterpretation of Popper in an attempt to solve real problems with Popper's original epistemology.

In this episode, Bruce unpacks exactly how — tracing the key points where Deutsch and Popper diverge: verisimilitude, demarcation, testability vs. criticism, and what "refutation" actually meant to Popper (hint: not what you think). A sympathetic but rigorous look at where "Deutschianism" improves on "Popperianism" and where it quietly smuggles in new problems.

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This week we were honored to interview Ray Scott Percival, a significant but also woefully under-appreciated figure in critical rationalism. Percival has been active in critical rationalist forums, conferences, and academic journals since the 90s and before. He has written for Quillette. He was the editor of a book of critical responses to Steven Pinker. He created an excellent documentary film called Liberty Loves Reason. But most significantly, in 2012 he wrote a book called Myth of the Closed Mind, which is available on Amazon in all the formats, including audio. The basic idea he explores there is that humans care about truth. We are truth seekers that create and pass on both rational and irrational memes. Dawkins calls the worst of these memes “mind viruses,” but what Percival points out is that as flawed as humans are, the good kind of memes have a competitive advantage in the war of ideas. Such a simple idea, but the implications of this are profound, and Percival has spent a lifetime wresting with them.

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Myth of the Closed Mind:

https://amzn.to/48xAoDG

X: @Ray_S_Percival

This week we had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Golding, M.D, who is a psychiatric physician. He is also heavily influenced by the philosophical ideas of David Deutsch and Karl Popper. At one point he calls himself a proponent of homeschooling and Taking Children Seriously. Together we wrestle with what critical rationalism and the universal explainer hypothesis suggests about mental illness and human creativity.

Steven Peck's "My Madness"

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X: @mgoldingmd

Bruce examines how effectively critical rationalism can ground the non-aggression principle (NAP)—the libertarian idea that, in some formulation, it is morally wrong to initiate violence.

But does it really make sense to interpret all areas of law through this single principle? Might it be better replaced by an alternative, such as a principle of least coercion? And what, from a critical rationalist perspective, does coercion actually mean? Is it a theory with substantial moral content, or an easy-to-vary principle that ultimately collapses into “coercion is whatever I dislike”?

And how might we test between these alternating views?

Bonus: What did Karl Popper think of Thomas Szasz's theories?

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In this video podcast, Bruce makes his boldest statement yet about probability. He dives into David Deutsch’s lecture “Physics Without Probability”—as well as our Episode 100 interview with Deutsch—to unpack the core argument.

Bruce carefully works through the mathematical details of Deutsch’s claim that probability is merely a “flat-earth approximation.” As best as he can make sense of it, however, the argument just doesn’t add up. In fact, Bruce concludes that Deutsch’s own reasoning seems to imply that probability is not at all comparable to a flat-earth approximation.

From there, he methodically explores whether this long-running debate about probability is really a case of word essentialism—an argument over definitions rather than a substantive difference.

He closes with an impassioned plea: if someone out there truly understands Deutsch’s argument, please help him pinpoint exactly where he’s going wrong.

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This week Bruce takes a deep dive into the epistemological ideas in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch is a fan of Karl Popper and a former guest on this show. He makes the case that the creation of objective knowledge relies on institutions and norms as much individuals. All claims must be open to criticism and not based on authority. This applies not just to science but to journalism, law, and all areas where humans seek to fallibly move closer to truth. Bruce considers how these claims relate to critical rationalism, specifically Deutsch’s conception of static vs dynamic societies. Does this provide another clue as to why we got stuck in static societies for so many millennia?

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This week, Bruce looks at how much critical rationalists do—and do not—subject their proposed best theories to critical testing. Bruce wrestles with how we apply the tools of critical rationalism—fallibilism, argument/debate, the demarcation criteria, falsification, and so on—to our real world ideas about economics, politics, and other issues.

To do this, Bruce asks these question: Isn't economics famously difficult, or even impossible, to test? Does that mean it is a metaphysical theory? Doesn't Popper's famous demarcation criteria force us to accept that label? And what about Praxeology and Anarcho Capitalism?

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