Naval Ravikant & Brett Hall on Clubhouse (NavalHouse) — 16 02 2021

I've been making podcasts about the work of quantum physicist David Deutsch. He's the fellow we credit with the theory of quantum computation, and he's written a couple of books. One is called 'The Fabric of Reality' and the other is 'The Beginning of Infinity', which provide an excellent worldview if you're interested in reason and trying to understand the world through a scientific lens.

So this is one of the great things about the internet. I read 'The Mind of God' by Paul Davies way back when, and then somehow from there I navigated to 'The Fabric of Reality' by David Deutsch. I did a really important job reading it a long time ago, but I barely comprehended any part of it and I certainly didn't finish it. And then I somehow stumbled across 'The Beginning of Infinity' probably when it was first released. It went straight on my bookshelf and never got read because I still hadn't gotten through 'The Fabric of Reality'.

And then finally a couple of years ago, maybe like a year and a half ago, I picked up 'The Beginning of Infinity' again. And I opened it and it was like a mind virus that just took over my brain. And I realized this is the best book that I read in 20 years. It may be the best book I've ever read, if you discount the spiritual philosophy stuff that I like. But within the genre of things that are directly useful, I think it's actually the most useful book I've ever read.

And that's a big point because I think this is one of the very few books that I felt made me a lot smarter. And it gave me a foundation for evaluating what is true and what is not going forward. And it also shattered a lot of beliefs and myths that I had. I probably changed my mind more times from having read this book than having read any other. And so it's a very, very important book. It's very difficult to read.

And what it is is David Deutsch, who is this brilliant physicist at Oxford University. Yes, at Oxford. I'm so bad at this. A brilliant physicist at Oxford. I'm bad at names and things of that nature because they don't really matter, right? It's the ideas that matter. Anyway, it's the work of David Deutsch, and he's actually taking Karl Popper's philosophy—Karl Popper being a philosopher of the theory of knowledge—but he's expanding upon it.

And into it he was mixing lots of physics and science. It was very interesting, but it's a very difficult read. So then I went and actually tried to read the original Karl Popper, who I know, Brett, you believe is a clear writer, but I found him even more confusing and more obtuse. And so I was sort of lost, but I went through 'The Beginning of Infinity' multiple times, and each time I would learn a little bit more.

And then finally I went online looking for people to explain this to me, because when you're dealing with difficult concepts, it's hard to do it on your own. You want to be challenged. So I actually went to my smartest local friends and I started talking to them about this book. And that's when I realized two things: one is almost everybody who claims to read this book has never read this book, or they haven't read it properly, they don't understand it. Or secondly, they just have a fundamental worldview that's so diametrically opposite to what the book says, they're incapable of absorbing the book. Their identity and their preconceived notions get in the way.

There's no one to discuss this book with. So I went online and I found this podcast by this character, TOK Teacher. And I thought, oh, this is just someone who likes to talk a lot. But actually, no, TOK stands for Theory of Knowledge, and it was Brett Hall. And so for the last six months, the podcast that I have been most listening to is Brett's Theory of Knowledge podcast, and I've been going through it faithfully. And it's not easy either because he's covering very difficult material.

But basically, David Deutsch is not just translating Karl Popper but expanding upon him magnificently, but modestly. He does it so modestly that you wouldn't realize that a lot of it is David's original work. And then Brett is explaining and expanding upon it, but also modestly, giving so much credit to David that he needs nothing for himself. But I would say I'm honored to have Brett here because he's the person that I've learned the most from in the last year.

Yeah, so I would say that the quantum theory, the theory of the multiverse, is fascinating. In fact, I am right now knee-deep with browser tabs open on everything from the photoelectric effect to the double-slit experiment to Schrödinger's cat, and I'm kind of wading through that part of the book again. And it's fascinating, but I don't think that's as interesting to the average person.

To the average person, what's fascinating is if you read the first three chapters of 'The Beginning of Infinity' and you really understand them, then first, for the first time in your life, you will have a very tight and precise definition of what science is. You will understand how human knowledge advances. You will have a basis for separating falsehood from truth from unknowable. You will understand why it is rational to be optimistic as long as we have free speech and Enlightenment values.

You will understand why we always are going to be able to create more resources and don't have to worry about the Malthusian trap. You'll probably revisit what you think about sustainability on this planet. You'll probably revisit what we think about humans as to how exceptional are we, how capable are we, are we sinners, are we creators, you know, what exactly are we. You probably walk away with a different view of AGI, artificial general intelligence, and where it's going.

If you make it to later chapters in the book, you may decide that beauty is actually an objective concept and not a subjective concept, or can be in certain cases. You may rethink political systems. You may rethink child raising. So there are lots and lots of examples where his theory applies. And actually, as a side project, you know, Brett and I have sort of committed to try to figure out how to make some of these learnings more accessible to everybody else.

But you know, people talk about mental models. I've always given that idea a short shift because I never thought that way. I never set out to read books to collect a bunch of mental models. That just seems too prescriptive, if you will, whereas in real life it's more complex. But I guess people like to distill things down into abstractions, as I do as well. And someone came up with—I think Charlie Munger and Peter Kaufman first did mental models in 'Poor Charlie's Almanac'—and so then it became a meme, and now there's like Twitter gurus making a living selling mental models. And that's fine.

But most mental models are actually really hard to pick up. Like for example, Nassim Taleb has recently popularized the mental model of ergodicity. And if you—it takes a little while to understand it, but the simplest way to look at ergodicity is that what's true for the group on average is not necessarily true for the individual averaged out over repeated iterations. Classic example: Russian roulette.

If six people play Russian roulette and if you live you get a billion dollars, then the expected value is five-sixths. You know, for five of them they'll get a billion dollars and one of them will get zero, and you know it's probably worth playing Russian roulette if you want the money. However, if one individual has to play Russian roulette with the same gun six times and gets a billion dollars or gets that expected value if they're alive at the end, then it's a raw deal. So ergodicity is one of those interesting mental models, but you're not going to figure it out just by reading the definition. It'll just make your head spin. You have to work through it. You have to put in the time, you just put in the hours. It helps if you actually use it in your real life context.

So that's how most mental models tend to work, and that you have to use them for them to actually become part of your repertoire. And I will say that 'The Beginning of Infinity' is the only book that I've encountered which has actually given me a whole bunch of new mental models to work with that I'm now struggling to incorporate into my everyday repertoire. So part of what I do is I try to explain them to people, and if I explain them to people, then I'll learn them in the process.

Right. And so this ties into a topic that is very important today, which is freedom of speech. Because all truth-seeking systems work the same way. If you work through in science, you make all conjectures and they're subject to criticism by your peers and by experiment. In innovation, you do trials of trying out all kinds of different things, and then you have errors where nature gives you feedback—no, sorry, your airplane didn't fly, try again. In evolution, you have variation and mutation, and then you have natural selection.

So we see in free markets, you have people making bold bets, which are a form of conjecture, and the market gives them feedback. In democracies, you have people passing policies, and if those are bad policies, they get voted out of office. And the important feature here is the error correction mechanism, the ability to say you were wrong and to peacefully transition that theory or that person or that institution out and swap it for another one. And that's why free speech is critical, because you are never permanently right. You're only provisionally right until proven otherwise.

And it's the nature of power-seeking people, and also just the nature of security-seeking people, to sort of lock in and say, 'No, no, this one we got figured out. This is beyond debate.' But that's literally what separates a successful society from an unsuccessful one. An unsuccessful society is one that says, 'We've got it figured out. You know, Confucius figured it out 2,000 years ago, or our scientists figured it out last year, and this cannot be challenged. This is done. We're done speaking of this, and let's move on to the next topic.' And we all know topics like this. There are topics, non-scientific topics certainly, which are closed to discussion, and they're now even scientific topics that are closed to discussion. And that is the hallmark of stasis and failure.

So if we want to be successful in society, kind of all we need to do is just embrace error correction, constant feedback and error correction, which is required.

So this is why I have the observation that the populace should always oppose whatever both parties agree upon. Because whatever both parties can agree upon is designed to perpetuate the two-party system. So for example, if they're gerrymandering, which makes it harder for them to turn over, and campaign finance reform, because they're all on the take, basically just hacking the system to leave themselves in power. And so whenever you see both parties agreeing on something, it usually has something more to do with power than it does to do with merit. You want that opposition. You want people to have a clear-cut value with each other. You want to try out the different ideas and then you want to hold out the ones that fail.

Turnover is good. It's just like if you're inventing something, if you're starting a company, or if you're even trying to get good at something, what matters is not the number of hours you put in, it's the number of iterations. So obviously in a political system, if you iterate too highly, it's destabilizing. But whatever time period the politicians tell you is needed, you got to cut that down, because their incentive is just to stay in power.

In fact, one beautiful phrase that's used a lot in the book and Brett's podcast is 'trying to explain the seen in terms of the unseen'. Right? That's what science is. An extreme example would be the Big Bang. Right? We see cosmic background radiation, we see distribution of hydrogen versus helium in the universe, we see a whole bunch of other things, and we say, okay, this can all be explained by the Big Bang. But nobody's ever seen the Big Bang, and nobody ever will. So obviously it's an explanation that requires the unseen behind it to work. But we think it's a pretty darn good explanation.

I mean, that's even true with the atomic theory of nature. Most of you never see an atom, and probably never will. And even if you do, through a scanning tunneling microscope or an electron microscope, then you have to have an explanation of the microscope itself and how it works. So we're constantly trying to stitch together the facts to try and explain things, and that's just what we do. And one of the things that this book does is it gets very rigorous about what a good explanation is and how you overturn an explanation, how explanations work.

And as Brett said earlier, explanations aren't achieved through induction. It's not through basic reasoning. It's not from just seeing the evidence pile up and saying, 'Well, this has happened a thousand times, and so the first time it's gonna happen the same way.' And instead, let's get into good explanations. Let's get into the type definition. And maybe you can help correct me, because David doesn't write for the layman, I know he wants to, but he doesn't. So the way I piece it together, and so I could be off, is I came up with a couple of characteristics.

A good explanation, first, is of course falsifiable. And I think most people stop there. Falsifiable means that there's some test you can run to see if it's true or false. It's not just something that cannot be tested. An example of something that cannot be tested is simulation theory, right? There's kind of no test you can run to prove the simulation theory false. Or religion, right? The 'God did it'. So it has to be falsifiable.

The second thing is it has to make narrow and risky predictions. So it has to say, 'Oh, this thing that you did not expect is probably true and is true,' and you have to go and test that. It has to be a pretty narrow, precise prediction. Obviously, mathematical is the basis in science, but just in general, if you believe you have truth, then that should be able to tell you something that you don't know, or something that somebody else can go and test.

And the third piece is the explanation should be hard to vary. The explanation itself should be precise. You shouldn't be able to change after the fact, like, 'Oh, well, that thing was off because of this or that.' Explanation can't be muddled with many other explanations. But this is a very fuzzy understanding. David didn't spell it out that specifically. I would love to hear your description of what a good explanation is.

Yes, I think so. There's all sorts of perverse ways in which people can use Solomonoff induction. They could use what's known as parsimony in science or Occam's razor in order to try and show aspects of science. And I'll give you a trivial example. Of course, I endorse the multiverse interpretation of quantum theory. Now I would say, and David would say, and various other people who actually subscribe to this particular way of understanding quantum theory, but it's not an interpretation. Lots of other people have interpretations of quantum theory, but what we're saying we have is just a literal reading of the equations of quantum theory. We're just taking the formalism seriously.

Now what some people object, and in fact Paul Davies is one of the people who actually, I happened to have a conversation with Paul Davies one time, and he objected on the basis that the multiverse theory postulates an uncountably large number of universes in order to explain one universe. Now to many people this is a violation of Occam's razor.

Yeah, exactly right. And so that's why we're forced into endorsing things like the multiverse, because the number of assumptions you make is minimal. In fact, you need no additional assumptions on top of quantum theory. All you say is quantum theory literally describes reality, and what do you get out of that? You get a multiverse. So yes, it causes the number of multiverses to proliferate, but that doesn't matter for science. I mean, after all, we cannot see every single planet in the observable universe, but we know because of our scientific theories that as soon as we have this theory of how planets form around stars like the sun, and in fact we can see now exoplanets orbiting other stars, that theory stretches out from beyond where we are here on Earth to the rest of the universe. And so we know even if we can't observe them, even with our most powerful telescopes, we cannot observe planets orbiting stars on the other side of the galaxy, let alone in other galaxies, we know they must be there. The planets proliferate because of the theory, but the assumption is very, very simple: this is how planetary formation works, therefore there must be planets orbiting stars in galaxies that we can't even see.

So anyway, I don't mean to recount the entire book in this one short conversation. It's a difficult set of topics, but actually maybe one other that we'll get to is let's talk about one of my favorite things to pick on, which is the dark forest hypothesis. And let me explain this for people for a second. So there's a trilogy by, I believe, Liu Cixin, I'm going to say that name horribly, but very famous Chinese science fiction author. And it's a trilogy and it's a physics-based sci-fi thriller. And in the middle book, which is called The Dark Forest, there's sort of a stipulation, but if you want to read the book you should probably leave the podcast now or the Clubhouse, I'm going to go into spoilers. There's a theory that there's lots of alien races in the universe, and it's not a multiverse construct, it's a universe. And there's lots of aliens out there and he tries to answer the Fermi paradox, which is if there's so many Kepler planets and so many habitable planets, where are all the aliens? The universe is so large, where is everybody? And the author's proposition, which is good for sci-fi but I think bad game theory, is that well they're all hiding. And the reason they're hiding is because there's a finite amount of resources in the universe and every spacefaring civilization eventually, like bacteria, just breeds and breeds and breeds until they run out of resources. So they always want more and more resources. So the moment they see another civilization light up anywhere, any possible way, they immediately destroy it. They just send the equivalent of an interstellar nuclear missile and wipe out the other civilization from a long distance. And this is happening all the time because you want your civilization to take over the entire universe and use all of its finite resources. And so there's a zero-sum game, a struggle for finite resources going on. And so it's like a dark forest, you're walking around at night in a dark forest and you're trying not to step on a twig because a predator will kill you. And if you hear somebody else step on a twig you immediately fire a shot in that direction hoping to kill whatever the heck that thing was before it kills you. And that's the dark forest that we live in.

And a lot of people are enamored by this pessimistic science fiction. Pessimism remains in vogue and pessimism remains in vogue with smart people. And they fall into this trap. But I would posit that this is just the Thomas Malthus trap all over again, which is we have too few resources and we're all going to die and we're going to run out of them. And when I read the book I knew this was wrong and I knew it was wrong on multiple levels. And I can give you a couple of them, but David Deutsch kind of brilliantly dismantles this argument without even addressing it directly. He never brings it up. In The Beginning of Infinity he lays the groundwork for why this has to be completely false. But you know, the way I thought about it is like, first of all, the universe is not short on resources. The universe is incredibly large, there are a lot of resources out there. In fact, what is short on is knowledge and cooperation. Any spacefaring civilization that can get off the planet, that can develop the technology to get off the planet, first of all has to learn how not to destroy each other. So they have to be cooperators by nature. They can't just be zero-sum game players. They have to build knowledge. And when you build knowledge, the scarcity is ideas. In fact, one of the brilliant things in the podcast, David defines wealth as a repertoire of physical transformations available to you. It's a brilliant definition, I encourage you to think about it, especially on a societal level. The repertoire of physical transformations that are available to you. So you obviously want to increase that repertoire of physical transformations. And to do that you need ideas and knowledge and scientific theories. You want trade. If you look at human history, yes there was war, but as soon as people encountered each other there was also trade. And today we're much more of a trading society than a warring society. We are in far fewer wars than we are in trading partnerships. And in fact if you encountered an alien civilization, the first thing you would want from them are ideas. The first thing they would want from you are ideas on how to make better use of the raw resources available in the universe. So I think that is the most powerful argument against the dark forest hypothesis.

There are a bunch of others by the way, which is that you start broadcasting radio waves as a civilization before you're even aware of how to get off the planet or that you can. And so the idea that you can somehow stay quiet and hide in this dark forest is nonsense because the first thing you do is you build a fire, so you're immediately noticed if anyone was going to notice you. So that's another problem. But I think the key one is that the scarcity within a species, across the species, across the stars, everywhere, is going to be knowledge. Yes. And this answer to the Fermi paradox, I mean there are many ways in which we can have a reasonable scientific understanding of what the responses to the Fermi paradox might be. I won't get into my hobby horse, I think I did an hour just of me sort of free-forming on one of my podcasts recently about all the ways in which there could be good scientific reasons why there in fact aren't intelligent aliens out there. Someone has to be first, maybe we're it. But I spoke for an hour about that, I won't go into it now. But what you've said there is very important about let's say there are intelligent aliens out there, let's say the universe is teeming with these civilizations. Well, we believe in objective progress. We believe there is a direction towards things getting better in the universe. Now, we can see this quite obviously with technology, you know, computers get better year after year, cars get better year after year, our scientific understanding gets better year after year. It's not like we can hold morality in a stupefied state separate from our progress in mathematics, science, technology. If you're making progress in those other domains, you are going to be making moral progress as well. If we encounter aliens on the other side of the galaxy who can actually traverse the galaxy, you know, faster than the speed of light by some technological means that we don't know, their morality is also going to be streets ahead of ours. If we're concerned now about other species on the planet, they're going to be even more concerned about other species in the galaxy than what we are. They will regard us as being, you know, moral midgets. They will think that they have a lot to teach us in terms of science, but also in terms of morality. And they're not going to be genocidal and wanting to wipe us out and to take all their resources from us.

But not only for those reasons, not only because morally they'll be superior to us if they're superior to us in their scientific understanding, but also because, and this is a poorly understood point, that nothing is a resource absent the knowledge that enables us to use it as a resource. Let's take for example pitchblende. Pitchblende is this rock. It's in the Northern Territory of Australia. Prior to the understanding of nuclear physics, that rock was a useless rock. I mean it was just sitting there in the ground, no one had any use for it whatsoever. Then someone figured out nuclear physics, or a bunch of scientists of course figured out nuclear physics. Then they figured out nuclear reactors. Then they realized they needed uranium in order to generate electricity and bombs and various other things that they might use radioactive materials for. And then pitchblende became an actual resource because we had the knowledge of how to use it.

But there's a funny anecdote that David talks about in The Fabric of Reality at some point about this element europium. You can look up europium on the periodic table, it's a very rare earth element. Anyway, if you think back to prior to flat screens, what we had were cathode ray tube color televisions. And we knew that in order to have a color television of the old style, you needed three different colored pixels, one of which had to be a red pixel. Now the only way, and the physics is unarguable, the only way to make red is to use this chemical called europium. It's just fortuitous that if you put an electric charge through gaseous europium in a pixel, it will glow red. And it happens to be the case that no other element on the periodic table does that. There is no other option. And the amount of europium that exists on the planet Earth is finite. And scientists at the time realized that well we're using up all the europium in order to make red pixels inside these cathode ray tubes. This means we will only have color television sets for so long, because once the europium runs out we can't have red pixels, therefore we can't have colored television screens. But we all sitting here right now, we know that's absolutely ridiculous. Of course it is, because we're not using cathode ray tubes now.

This is the message here. This should be clear for any resource that's finite. It's not like we're going to reach a point where if that resource runs out there's going to be catastrophe, it's going to be the end of something or other. What do humans do? They use their creativity to understand that some other piece of hitherto useless piece of matter can be used as a resource to replace whatever the thing is that might be finite. For any given resource, it's finite. But resources, as an aside, is the single most common way that people become public. They basically say we are running out of X. And sometimes it's oil, sometimes it's oxygen, sometimes it's europium, sometimes even Charlie Munger was saying we're going to run out of fertilizer because we don't have that nitrogen. You know, Malthusian, we're going to run out of all these different resources and we're all going to starve. Paul Ehrlich, population explosion. In fact, even Mike Murray talks about running out of water in California. Right? And it even stretches further than that. We're going to run out of jobs. We're going to run out of money. We're going to run out of wealth. Right? These scarcity, these finite, zero-sum sort of philosophies are incredibly common. They're actually the dominant paradigm in our society. And I think one of the things that you have to get over if you want to be successful as a human being is you have to get over the scarcity mentality, to get over this finite resource mentality. We are not in a resource situation. The universe is a very large place. There is an infinite amount of raw material out there. The only thing that prevents us is using knowledge to progress, to convert those raw materials into whatever we want. And yes, some of it may seem incredibly fanciful, like how are we going to solve CO2? But we've always been able to invent technology. What we have to do is basically just push good ideas forward, not stamp ideas out. Let people experiment. And you know, the knowledge, if you don't get there, in fact I think Deutsch says it's like the only real sin is a lack of knowledge, right? Or it's like the closest thing to it. Or is preventing error correction from letting us create the knowledge that we want. As long as we can find the knowledge, we can solve the problem.

Spaceship Earth, right? That was a tough one. Most people don't want to swallow that line of argument. But if you get to his book and you read the Spaceship Earth part, you've all been brought up to believe that Earth is this rare precious blue dot and you know, if we destroy Spaceship Earth we're all going to die and it's terrible. And I was born to believe exactly the same thing. And Deutsch turned me around 180 degrees.

As an example, Moderna's vaccine for COVID-19 was ready to go on January 13th, which was about over a year ago, January 13th of last year. And so we didn't do human challenge trials because medical establishment objected and because all of this now being done in the public domain thanks to social media. So fear spreads more easily. It's hard to solve the so-called trolley problem. But if we had been like an older society and let people volunteer for challenge trials where they basically get injected with a vaccine, they're young healthy people who are taking risks, but you know, they're sacrificing and maybe they're getting paid a lot, maybe they're getting fame out of it for the rest of society, we could have had a vaccine six months sooner. And what would be the cost of that? But it's a certain pessimism that seems to infect society that actually has actual huge repercussions like this. If you're too scared, you give up all your rights, you give up all your power, you slow down your innovation, you start believing in science as opposed to being critical about science and doubting everything and thinking it through for yourself. And society gets held back and there's a real repercussion to that.

Yeah. In fact, anyway, anyone can see the bungling of the FDA and the CDC trying to make their own test kits, banning private testing, you know, preventing in-home instant tests. Even to this day, I know people illegally buying in-home antigen tests because the FDA has not authorized using them outside of your doctor, when they're actually quite helpful and quite safe and reasonably accurate. People couldn't do mask manufacturing because it didn't meet the stringent FDA standards. Even now, I'm sure the vaccine rollout is partially delayed because we are treating every vaccine dose as if it has to be made perfectly, as if we're in peacetime as opposed to being in an emergency wartime situation. So it's just the regulated ability to say no crushes innovation. And we see this across the board. In crypto, the internet is finally moving into its own native payments mechanism because first it had to figure out how to decentralize away from the prying of regulators. There are companies like Uber and Airbnb that had to fight local regulations every step of the way. But there they kind of did a divide and conquer, you know, your neighboring town can make Uber and Airbnb legal and the next town doesn't. So you get this iteration, this error correction feedback loop where the denizens of the town say actually I want Uber or I don't want Airbnb. So they get to see the experiment run in parallel next door. But if you go up against federal regulators, you're dead meat. You have no chance. You're immediately illegal everywhere. So we're just constrained in where we can do innovation based on how much regulation is present. That's not to say there should be no regulation whatsoever. Obviously you don't want everybody flying a drone past your house and there is such a thing as the commons, there are externalities. But at the same time, the level of regulations that most societies set is too high. What you actually would love to have is real competitive experimentation. You'd love to have neighborhoods, society, states, door-by-door, state by state, neighborhood by neighborhood that make their own choices.

It's not a coincidence that if you look back in human history, most eras of innovation are done by city-states. In the US it was done by federalism, right? Like different states allowed different levels of competition. For example, one of the reasons why California has a lot of tech industry as opposed to Massachusetts, where arguably more tech industry is born, is because in Massachusetts non-competes are enforceable. So if you work for IBM or DEC, you know, Digital Equipment Corporation, you can't go work for a competitor or you get sued by your former employer. And so that just prevented smart people from going off to start companies. But fortunately California didn't have that. Essentially in California, what seemed like a bug to the employer was actually a feature that allowed for innovation.

Yeah. People sometimes complain about how the markets, for example, look at the stock market, seems to get some things wrong. Well, it's volatile because it's absorbing all the information as it comes in. And that's actually, as markets become more efficient, they become more volatile, not more stable, because they're responding more and more quickly to more and more nuances and information happening in real time. So just because markets are incomprehensible to you doesn't mean they're not working. In fact, it's a clear sign that they're working, because if they were comprehensible to any single individual, we wouldn't need the market to give us the answer. And it's very important to distinguish between a mob of people demanding something versus a market demanding something. Just because they're a group doesn't mean they're the same thing. So the way I think about it is that a group of people who are herding together, who are using social proof, who are doing something because other people in the group are doing it, that's a mob, and they're almost always wrong. Whereas a group of people who are acting independently, each making their own independent decision, and then you're collecting their independent decisions together to figure out the answers, that's a market. And that's what you get, for example, in voting or in the stock markets. Whereas a mob is what you get on Twitter. And this is where this idea really brings everything together. The idea that with knowledge creation, what we're about is error correction. So within science, what we're trying to do is to correct our errors in the theories that we have, the explanations that we have. And each time we do correct errors, that enables us to make progress. And there's a perfect parallel there with the market. When the market apparently goes wrong, when there's a correction, it's called a correction for a very good reason, because there was something wrong there. The market is not a way of getting perfect economic progress or economic progress every single day. What it's going to do is trial things out in the same way the scientist in the laboratory is going to conduct an experiment. They're going to try something out for the first time. It's going to fail. That's part of the process. So too obviously with innovation and entrepreneurship, you're going to try something and it's going to fail now and again, and that's just part of the process of making headway, making progress across any domain. As I like to say, the waste paper basket of the musical composer should be full. It's all the times they've tried and failed, but they're aiming for something objectively better than what went before. That's only by embracing the failure that you're able to enjoy the success when it comes.

So I'm going to have to go to bed soon, but let me give kind of the grand unifying theory here of how this can improve your life, which is, and for those of you who are already aware of this, together basically become an error-correcting machine in everything that you do. And always embrace error correction, especially when the feedback is from markets and from nature, because that's valid feedback. From other people, but if it's from people making independent decisions, that's a market. If it's from nature, then that's invaluable, because that's nature, that's reality. And so error correcting in your politics means that you should always be looking to support, you know, turnover of incumbents, voting the, you know, people out of office, changing your mind based on how well their policies have performed. Error correction in science is you should be looking for people who are open to conjecture and criticism. If they're not open to criticism, if they're saying 'believe in science', that's not science, that's religion but using the name of science. And instead of using the robes of priests, they're using the white lab coats of a so-called scientist. And in your own personal life, you should all, if you want to get good at something, you just iterate at it. You just try doing it as many different times as possible. But it's not the number of hours that you put in, it's the number of iterations. So always just change how you do it. For example, if you're learning tennis and you're just brand new at it, just try all kinds of different things. Don't just do what your coach tells you to do. You know, one moment you're focusing on your swing, the next moment you're focusing on your footwork. Then once you've gone through that, you're basically maybe thinking hard about how the racket's going to make contact with the ball. And the next time, without thinking at all, try to go through as many different experiments as you can. And same way in your company, until you find product-market fit, you should be trying lots and lots of sharing new things, lots and lots of iterations until you find that product-market fit. Almost all of truth-seeking, without exception, is about fast iteration and correction. So you have to be very honest with yourself. You have to be honest with your team. You can't have too strong of an attachment to what happened in the past. You can't have an identity baked into it. You can't be afraid to look stupid. And one of the things that I always try and do is like, Brett is up here. Brett is way smarter than me in physics. Way, way, way smarter, orders of magnitude. I've already said things that I'm sure made him cringe and he's being kind, but I don't mind him contradicting me. I want to learn it. And the only way I'm going to learn it is by being a beginner and putting myself out there. And so I can't have this idea that for example that I'm good at physics, because there's always somebody like Brett out there. So you kind of have to go back to a beginner's mind. You have to start over. And you just have to be willing to be proven wrong. At the same time, you have to look at your authority figures and say they're wrong. Like Brett talked to Paul Davies. Davies is a god-like figure in physics. Davies gave him a bad explanation of why he thought multiverse theory was wrong. And Brett didn't say, oh my god, Richard says this, Carl Popper quotes this, so therefore I should believe that. No, that's appeal to authority, that's a complete fallacy. It has to make sense to you. If it doesn't make sense to you because you don't understand it, then sure, make the effort to understand it. But if it doesn't make sense to you because it's possibly wrong, then who cares who said it. In fact, the more it matters who the speaker is, the less the thing itself actually matters. Right? That's common sense. The more it matters who the speaker is, the less the content is relevant on its own.

With that, we're out of here. Thanks everybody. Goodbye.