Derek Muller (@Veritasium) has produced yet again another tour-de-force video. It is breathtaking in how well explained it is. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo It's titled "This is mathematic's fatal flaw" (Hint: it's not). I love almost all of Derek's stuff. A notable exception is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc . Even the title of "Parallel Worlds Probably Exist: here's why" makes me grimace.  (The reason is: they exist. There's no "probably" about it. But Derek sort of leans Bayesian a lot. And they aren't, strictly, “parallel". If you wonder why this should make one wince in a little intellectual agony, consider if a similar headline read “The spherical Earth probably exists. Here’s why.” 

All that aside, if you want to learn more about all that see my multiverse series here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6C_K18A4f8&list=PLsE51P_yPQCQqJDb65AIVLads8PKxYuPm But I forgive him. He's an Aussie and I think the very best physics populariser and educator alive today.

So this “breathtakingly” wonderful video of Derek’s is all about Godel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing machines and related matters. But at 34 minutes - it is long. (I’m one to talk. My own video on a similar topic arising from the work of David Deutsch in “The Beginning of Infinity” runs to 1 hour and 12 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMtort-zvdI ). I mention that because it places me in a position of some experience: people rarely watch the whole video!

So for those who don’t here is my 3 minute explanation of a really cool result I never quite understood before.

At the 28 minute mark, Derek refers to an extremely long journal article published in Nature called “Undecidability of the Spectral Gap” - it can be downloaded in full here https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16059 or in the ArXiv here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04573.pdf for free. It’s 126 pages including a lot of dense mathematical argument. 

Anyways what drew my attention was that Derek flashed up on the screen a quote “from the authors” which said

“Even a perfect complete description of the microscopic interactions between a material’s particles is not always enough to deduce its macroscopic properties”. 

Now this is an astonishing conclusion to draw from a mathematical proof. Here they are saying that reductionism - the claim that a “complete description” (description mind you, not explanation) cannot always be derived of a system given the behaviour of particles at the microscopic level.

I already knew reductionism was false. It’s a bad explanation (and more besides). But here, apparently, is a mathematical proof.

I went to the paper, however, and that quote is not there.  To be fair he never said it would be. So I googled. It required me to purchase a copy of “The Scientific American” (this one) before I found the quote on page 37. So, to be fair, the quote is not part of the proof but rather a comment on the proof by one of the authors. But that's ok. (A little more below the image...)

So to be fair this is a comment by one of the authors on the proof rather than a part of the proof itself. Nevertheless, this is an amazing result.

The next time someone wants to argue that determinism rules out higher level causation or emergent causation or top down causation or anything else like that not only is their appeal to reductionism a bad explanation. It also happens to be provably untrue given quantum mechanics.

Neat.

Societies fail. But none fail because they focussed too much attention on detecting and correcting errors. This is to say: criticising too much or too often. A criticism is an explanation of why something is faulty, flawed or false. It is the necessary precondition for solving a problem: to identify what is wrong, and correct it. All extinct societies have failed because they have failed to solve their problems in time. One important reason is that in those societies there have become taboos that have slowed the rate of problem solving. Traditions about who to defer to, for example. The belief that king must always be deferred to (because, implicitly, he must always be right because he is divinely so!) - or some leadership committee or the  commissars - and so on, are required to be above criticism in order to maintain stability (by which is meant “order”). Laws appear that make it mandatory to speak with deference about the ruler or rulers and never to criticise. To be critical of this, but never that. Indeed to be especially skeptical of certain ideas (like, say, “freedom” or “equality”) – skeptical and perhaps insulting and emotional: not critical in a reasonable way. So, for example, North Koreans must never criticise the leader or regime – but they should be careful to be especially “critical” of the United States and the system in South Korea. Insulting and emotionally “critical” that is. Not reasonably.

In a genuine tradition of criticism no such taboos can persist, even if they arise for a time – because they will be criticised and corrected. In all areas of life, in an open and dynamic society where there exists a tradition of criticism frank and honest discussions can be had about all the factors, on all sides, from all perspectives, about the most pressing problems.

Without this panopticon approach to speech and criticism we end up in a state where certain situations and scenarios cannot be broached and never recognised as actually of civilisational consequence. The traditions within societies that do not cultivate a tradition of criticism do not allow for the conditions for all important problems to be identified in time. Or if they do, they do not permit them to be broached. Or if they do, not broached in the most effective ways. Were any of this false, those civilisations would still be with us. But they are not because they did not solve their problems in time. The ancient society of Pompeii did not solve its problems in time. Did they not know about the volcano? Why not? Why was their progress too slow in identifying the risk and saving the members (if only by fleeing in time).

Criticism is destabilising - in OUR society - of ideas, not the society itself that thrives upon it. A tradition of criticism imported into, say, North Korea would destabalise that society but not civilisation. Indeed it would bring improvements to civilisation by civilising it. One might claim “But there have been countless societies without a tradition of criticism that have been stable. I suspect many more for much longer periods of time.”

But this is false. There have not been. All those were, demonstrably - by the very evidence of their own non-existence *now* - all inherently unstable. Moreover what stability they did superficially appear to possess was due to the opposite of a tradition of criticism. They enforced the status quo. This is the “inherent instability” in the system. For any society – the mere “appearance” of stability is not actual stability unless there is a good explanation as to why things are not changing. For example, it may superficially appear that an ancient tribe that has existed in the same way for thousands of years is “stable”. But this is only apparent stability. Not genuine stability. They are pencils balanced on their tip. Sure, if nothing else changes in the environment – there is no little bump – the pencil remains “stable” (balanced precariously). But is it actually stable? What mechanism to prevent it toppling over is there? Or is there every reason to think that any number of things could make it fall? Our thousands-of-year old ancient society is unstable in the same way. There is every reason to think that any problem we would easily solve would wipe them out. Their society is inherently unstable.
 
Unlike ours. Which is stable. Inherently. But only if we maintain a tradition of criticism. Ours is not like that precariously balanced pencil standing on its tip but rather a modern skyscraper with earthquake prevention mechanisms, a great firefighting system and computer controlled environment, surrounded by surveillance cameras and with a full time team of engineers and others maintaining its day to day stability, checking each rivet and bolt and column with sensors placed all about the precision engineered structure. It is maintained and many of the causes keeping it up are in the conscious awareness of those experts who are continuously finding areas of concern and correcting problems to ensure that should the building move even just a little this way or that, the support structure corrects it, to keep it upright.
 
For all societies (or individuals) problems are inevitable. Some large number could be lethal and will be lethal – permanently revealing the inherent and latent instability that was always there in the system – by destroying it. Unless, of course, the problem is identified in time. And corrected in time. To maintain the stability. But that requires criticism in time, and continuous criticism in time. But that of course takes a particular kind of tradition. One that protects criticism. All criticism. It’s the only thing that is an explanation for genuine stability – which is quite unlike superficial stability that has persisted - but only by good fortune. We have that too - but not only that. We also have a deeper explanation of the causes that keep us stable. The thing that allows us to "change" with the problems of our times. By adapting, making progress and improving - in time. It's what we're used to now. We're used to criticising things - that's our tradition. It's what keeps the whole thing stable.  
 

Conjecture: One can try to disagree with just a key part of Popper’s philosophy (like his take on the line of demarcation, or the paradox of tolerance or what democracy actually is) – and attempt to embrace the rest, but then one finds inconsistencies in their own thinking. It becomes clear to a casual reader that if I reject this key part of Popper's philosophy, then (logically) that entails rejecting that part and then that part and that part and so on. Soon I have to reject it all.
 
And I must reject it all if I reject some key part (like authoritative sources, or a critical method) because to do otherwise would be to change my worldview and thus so much of the received wisdom I have been taught or indoctrinated with. So I have a choice: embrace the change and indeed change the way I think about almost everything in my intellectual life (and even about what I regard as common sense) – and this might be painful (in truth, to a Popperian, it’s fun – or it can be learned to be fun).

Or I can simply reject Popper.
 
Embracing the critical rationalist worldview/Popperian-style philosophy is deeply psychologically destabilising at first. It means viewing reality in a new way and thus removing oneself, in a sense, from one’s intellectual peers. Popper is not like other philosophers. I can reject elements of Descartes (let’s say his “proof” of the existence of God) – but accept his cogito (“I think therefore I am”) and feel no great destabilisation in my thinking. Leibnitz’s “monadology” whether I embrace or reject it, would seem to have no great bearing upon how I think deeply about each and every issue. Perhaps there is a fundamental indivisible particle. Perhaps not. Perhaps there is an intelligent creator. Perhaps not. Much of this is disconnected, to some extent, from the problems I am interested in my life anyway.
 
But Popper and Deutsch change (and challenge!) my actual thinking – moment to moment. And on topics near to me. I cannot be sure of anything – but I know quite a lot. I can improve my thinking and myself. I can make progress. I am self reliant, but I can cooperate. There is no authority I need to turn to, but I can criticise any who claim to be a source of truth and thereby come closer to the truth myself. No one has the final answer (including me) and “we are all equal in our infinite ignorance”. And that last one can give one a real sense of vertigo upon first really comprehending it. And not all people find vertigo - that sense of falling - fun. But we can all learn to. Yet few people, as a proportion of the whole, ever choose to go skydiving despite the recommendations of almost everyone who has.
 
Philosophy - and Popperian philosophy in particular - goes right to the deepest parts of one's psychology and how they frame their thinking on any topic worth thinking about. It requires a shift in gears, which many (not all!) find unpleasant - at least at first. Like skydiving or roller coaster riding. Should the unpopularity of any fun thing count against it? Of course not. Most people simply do not know what they don't know. It does not count against skydiving that it's unpopular. Nor anything else people find gives richness and purpose to their lives but which is poorly subscribed.

​And if one has spent a career defending a mainstream thesis, or a thesis that has merely adapted some ideas within a mainstream framework, it is unsurprising then, that one would be reluctant to relinquish all that framing for fear of the mental pain and anguish which might accompany it.
 
Unless, of course, that person is truly, to their core, a Popperian. In which case that kind of relinquishing is one of the most joyful parts of life.

This review is really for people who have already seen the documentary. It does not try to explain how intriguing and interesting the documentary is but does refer to some of the content of the documentary. There are no significant spoilers (but there are some - marked).
 
Who knows how accurate this documentary is, unless you are one of the people actually involved in the case, who went to the hearings and got to hear arguments about all the evidence from both sides? I only watched the 20 episodes of this show, so I don’t know. I do know documentary makers can make stuff up or emphasise the wrong thing and completely eliminate important information. Anyone who enjoys science documentaries knows this. Especially animal documentaries. If you’ve ever seen an episode of “Meerkat Manor” you will know what I mean. The narrative and anthropomorphising is so cartoonish, one would barely have been surprised had the little critters’ noises been subtitled in English. That aside, documentaries about people are often so interesting because we can get an insight into how people think given what they say. And this documentary underlines what many of us thought we knew about how legal minds sometimes tend to think. From judges to lawyers, police and even family members of the victims and accused -  how people think about evidence can be astonishing – and frightening. Because people’s lives hang in the balance on these questions about evidence and its use in courts of law – apparently - at times. 
 
So there are two epistemological challenges here: (1) to what extent we can know the documentary is accurate in terms of its couching of the events from beginning to end of the trials (2) taking at face value what the people involved say and do about “evidence”.
 
Rather often the language used by – and indeed the expectations of - the professionals involved – is about what the evidence “points to” and how the “balance of probabilities suggests that” and how it might be “easy for someone to believe” and so on and so forth. The evidence is supposed to speak for itself in some way and if a plausible story is told that fits some of the evidence, then this means that the story is in some way “credible”. 
 
But given any set of facts (“the evidence”) an infinite number of stories can always be told that are “consistent” with it. Consistent does not mean much when it comes to evidence and explanations – it just means “not contradicted by”. For example – from my first to last waking moment, everything I experience is consistent with my being the only actual person in the universe. Or that I am still dreaming. Or that I just came into existence and that at any moment…NOW…I might be gone again. These are all terrible explanations. Yet consistent with “the evidence”. A dent in a car can be evidence the owner crashed it. Or someone borrowed it and crashed it. Or someone stole it and crashed it. Or no one did anything and the brakes failed while it was parked on an incline. Or a passing ruffian with a baseball bat (or strong kick) dented it. Or a meteor fell from space. Or…the list of “evidence” and theories “consistent with it” is literally infinite. As we will come to see whether any of those theories are good explanations of the evidence comes down not to consistency (which is just an entirely insufficient logical necessity) but whether any evidence actively rules out a good explanation in the case where we have two (or more). In most cases we are lucky to have one explanation. In some very rare cases there are two good explanations – and in that case, that’s where the role of “crucial” evidence comes in. We shall come to this, and its role in the documentary, momentarily.
 
In courts of law we have a problem scientists have not always understood but which some philosophers have – that of “the evidence” being interpreted. Evidence is theory laden. It does not speak for itself. Nowhere is this more profoundly revealed than in this documentary series. [Minor spoiler alert]. I will give an example: it is asserted by the prosecution that the murder victim was killed by a bullet to the head. She was shot, in the head whilst in a particular garage – owned by the defendant. This is all seems very compelling and under almost all other circumstances similar – it might very well be the only purported explanation. And it might well be reasonable.
 
The bullet, we are shown, is provided to the court and an expert witness brought forward to say the bullet, fired from a gun owned by the defendant had been analysed and the victim’s DNA found upon it. Again: that seems to be terribly compelling evidence. The accused shot the victim in his garage with his gun and the bullet was left behind after it passed through the victim’s skull. It is – as they say - “consistent with” the defendant firing the gun through the head of the victim. But is it the best explanation? What other explanations could there be? Well in this case there was another good explanation: the entire police force involved and prosecution team were equal parts incompetent and corrupt and some of them framed the defendant. Why is that ever a good explanation? It rarely is, except that in this case the prosecution – the state – had motive and means. The state was in another legal battle at the exact time the murder purportedly occurred – and not against just anyone. But against the defendant for *wrongful conviction* for a rape years earlier and the defendant was seeking legal damages into the millions. These are high stakes. But how can we distinguish between these two cases – the defendant is the killer or the defendant is being set up?
 
It should be clear we cannot look for stories consistent with the evidence, or evidence that “confirms” a particular theory. We must, and solely, in this rarest of situations - look for evidence that can categorically rule out a particular theory. Indeed this must always be the defence team’s purpose. To rule out their client…and if they cannot, then the best explanation (the case put forward by the prosecution) must surely carry the day. The defence, upon being successful, then leaves everyone in the unfortunate situation of saying "We don't know" - we do not know who committed the crime. And the police should redouble their efforts to construct a new, better theory that actually explains what happened.
 
But in this case there were many pieces of evidence ruling out the guilt of the defendant (as the documentary explained). For example, if the victim was indeed shot in the head in the garage – why was there no blood found anywhere? The evidence of a clean floor in all the places the victim was shot, and earlier apparently stabbed and raped – is crucial evidence against the theory either that gunshots and stab wounds reliably cause bleeding or that the victim was never shot or stabbed at that location. Many competing “what if…?” questions might be asked. What if they cleaned the floor? (With what and why is there no cleaning residue as expected and why is the rest of the garage still such a mess if it was cleaned?). Why do ballistics experts agree there should be blood splatter everywhere in the garage – especially microdroplets of spray? Why would they clean all the blood but not the bullet? 
 
Years later, when scanning tunnelling electron microscopy is used to image the bullet up close, there really is crucial evidence. The bullet – apparently used in a murder - when compared to other similar bullets fired through bone – shows no sign of bone residue. Yet all other similar bullets do and there is a good explanation of how bullets fired through bone, end up with bone fragments in them. Bullets get impaled with whatever material they pass through. And in this case the bullet in question, when compared to similar bullets fired through a plywood wall of the garage shows signs of plywood. This evidence rules out the theory it was fired through bone and the best explanation for its presence in the garage was that it was fired through the plywood wall of the garage. Indeed dozens of bullet holes in the garage and thousands of bullets fired on the property testify to the fact this bullet was not unusual at all in that garage. Except in one way: it was claimed to be a murder weapon lacking any evidence of being a murder weapon.
 
That plank in the case of the prosecution team collapses. So the bullet did not go through bone. It was not the murder weapon. And if that is what the evidence that was supposed to be explained by the defendant actually being a murderer, then the defendant is not a murderer. Very very few people are murderers. But people who are suing police forces for many millions of dollars might very well be accused of such. [Spoiler alert] For those reading along: the DNA of the victim found on the bullet is explained as being planted using a source from the victims’ home.
 
Now I do not know the truth of any of this. But what struck me watching it was how again and again the police evidence was simply put forth as being “consistent” with a particular story and this led to judges and others seeming to become more and more “confident” in that particular explanation. 
 
While on the other hand, evidence that ruled out the defendant was not held up as being of crucial importance. Crucial in two senses (1) it is of the highest importance. More important than other “circumstantial” evidence like “a bullet was found in the garage of the accused” and more significantly: (2) it categorically rules out one of the two competing good explanations.
 
It is rare in criminal cases to have many competing good explanations – just as it is in science. Very often when the police have identified a suspect, they have good reasons for doing so: there is a video of the crime. There is blood literally on the hands (or shirt) of the accused. There are many independent witnesses. All of this comes together to make a very hard to vary explanation of what happened. But in this case, the fact is, from what is shown in “Making a Murderer” at least two good explanations – both hard to vary (but to rather different extents) exist. And in this case it is the crucial evidence – the evidence that can decide between the two competing theories – that matters most. And in the documentary there is a long list that, to a typical viewer, shows the accused is innocent of the murder because the evidence was planted. 
 
 
To summarise this: the best explanation is: some evidence *consistent with* the claim “he is guilty of murder” was planted…and a bunch more evidence that rules out “he is guilty of murder” was utterly ignored.
 
I can heartily recommend this to everyone. Compelling viewing for anyone interested in epistemology and philosophy (as well as everyone else!).

There are also many more ways of being wrong than right. A far better emphasis is that: there are infinitely many ways of being wrong on any issue where one could potentially be right. The truth - any amount anywhere - is very very hard won. Error is the normal state of things. Yet Sean’s sentiment is that the truth can almost be tripped over and because it is so easy to find the truth (because “there are infinitely many true statements”) the problem is in choosing among all this truth. But that is not our circumstance at all. The infinite sea of misconception and falsehoods really do run deep - far deeper. Don’t be afraid of truth: celebrate getting nearer to it. Misconception is also nothing to fear but accept that it is ubiquitous and it is choosing among misconceptions and choosing which misconceptions to concentrate upon that is more like the challenge before us.



2. On the first sentence in Sean's tweet above: a less technical error and more a matter of psychology or motivation of intellectual pursuits (or anywhere else for that matter: intellectual activity is on a continuum with every other activity. Theoretical hydrological engineering is no doubt an intellectual activity...but it is not entirely disconnected at all from clearing blockages in a toilet). Are intellectuals really trying to say true things as the first sentence claims? I find it misleading to claim they are because in science (or anywhere else) people are trying to solve problems. Whether they would describe - of their own intellectual work - it as a primary attempt to say “true things” is something we should doubt. In truth we should expect each solution or theory or explanation given by the intellectual to contain some error. There is no error free state and though it might not be a consciously understood theory by many of them, intellectuals tend to seem to accept their fallibility: that, broadly speaking, they could be wrong. And so they are often not trying to have the final error-free word: which is to say trying to say true things. So I doubt the first sentence. I think intellectuals are better described as trying to solve their most pressing problems and trying to say things that approximate the truth in some ways.

3. Of the last sentence, I also do not have a technical objection. But this one is perhaps the most important:
It says: “I’d like to better understand how we do - and should - decide which ones are the ones worth saying.” So the concern here is about which true things we should say (putting aside for just the moment that saying true things is, as we have seen, technically impossible). What this injunction is about is a policing of the mind. It is already the case that the mind is an error correction machine: within a single mind much can (and is!) be criticised successfully and rejected without it ever being uttered. But it is impossible to have all the best criticisms in hand and other minds and other voices are often very good to bounce ideas off. We cannot prophesy beforehand what conjecture might actually be useful. We are fallible. The idea that we can have a recipe or plan or other set of rules that can help us decide what to say and not is a form of tyranny. Given that we have already established that there are not an infinite number of true statements - indeed that we cannot think “true” claims. At best we have approximations - then given all we have are approximations, given our best attempt at getting to the truth or solving the problem - we should feel free to share our ideas. But we are being told by so many quarters right now to be careful what we say; that this or that term or word is damaging. This chilling effect is stultifying debate and making younger people fearful. It is becoming the moral zeitgeist right now: an agitation to be the first to proclaim ​what else should not be said.
​
So the misconception here is that public intellectuals should be standing up for, or compiling further criteria for standards about what not to say. We have already been given so many reasons to avoid saying what should be said for fear of reprisals or pile ons or even actual violence in response to mere words: there is a pervasive culture especially on social media and in the media and on campuses that might be called a culture of social compliance. There is a quiet from some quarters and there has been a chilling effect on debate such that the idea that right now in 2020 we need more criteria for not saying things.

Few people have so very many things to say publicly that their major concern is in determining how to sift what should be said from what should not. The main problem for most people is either in having too little to say (period) or too little courage to say what is really on their minds. This latter concern is not an especially new phenomena, but there is a local maximum in the historic landscape when it comes to 2020 and pressure to say what one side (and sometimes the other) in politics deems is correct speech. What I grant may have been lost in determining "what are the ones worth saying" are simple traditions of courtesy, respect and politeness. There are cultures where traditions of what is worth saying and what is not have generated some rather robust ways of avoiding the truth when it needs to be said. But on the other hand these cultures can also help people to avoid the pitfalls of simply saying whatever happens to pop into their head an commit faux-paxs. The problem we have now is that older "traditions of criticism" that might be called "polite society" have themselves been rejected for either "just deliberately offend people you disagree with" or "you must obey our language codes for fear of violent reprisal". Norms in polite society already had distilled out much that would have been called "offensive" - but much of that is being overturned in an attempt to artificially engineer culture rather than allow it through the slow trial and error evolution of culture that has typically occurred throughout human history...except for all those times politics gets involved by insisting on this or that code of behaviour.

Whatever the case, what we do need right now is not more new criteria for helping to decide which things are worth saying (for this is rarely actually a problem for anyone) - but rather we need more straight forward honesty coupled with courage. We need more people to feel free enough to genuinely try to utter explanations of one's own best guessed solutions to problems: without fear of the mob (or in some places government censorship and retribution).

We especially do not need the additional abstract fear that one might be failing to do the impossible: like utter "A Truth" for fear it wasn’t worth saying.

-----
Important inspiration for all this comes from a Tweet by David Deutsch, reproduced below.
​

The above image links to the original video, or just click here. As always: a wonderfully insightful talk. This is not a summary of the talk but rather my two favourite quotes (passages?). The talk contains important material on what an AGI must be and why we must not treat them differently to any other "race" of people. There is a wonderful part about how the feared existentially deadly "black balls" in urns can be turned into white balls - given the existence of people and when they create the requisite knowledge. The black balls are supposed to be problems we cannot solve in time - as though our inventions are random things we pluck from the unknown and cannot learn more about over time, let alone in time. I leave those matters aside for now.

Emphasis (in bold and/or underlined) is my own.

Quote 1 (From 13 mins 30 secs)
 
“Once we have a universal constructor, all construction, all repetitive labour, will be replaced by writing computer programs to control the universal constructor. And wealth will consist of our library of programs. The universal constructor can be programmed to self reproduce, so once you have one you soon have 2^n of them and it can be programmed to perform self maintenance too, all from scratch: starting with mining the raw materials – perhaps from the asteroid belt using solar energy or whatever. The program may be hard to write, but once it’s written and if you own the rights to those asteroids – you can sit back and watch your 2^n Teslas roll in, with zero additional effort. And no, we are not going to have a universal constructor apocalypse and be converted to grey goo. A universal constructor is just an appliance – it can’t think – it doesn’t know that its present job is to make 2^n Teslas and it doesn’t want anything. Unless of course you put an AGI program into it. Then it does become indeed potentially dangerous without limit. But that’s for the same reason that you are. Each of you is precisely one of those universal constructors endowed with an AGI program. Or I should say GI? It makes no difference.”
 
Quote 2 at 17 mins exactly (this is after describing two kinds of dangers most people are concerned about - known dangers like deadly viruses without cures, for example).
 
“The third category of dangers are the ones to which most efforts should be devoted and yet they are the ones that are currently least feared because they are ones that are not yet known. Like in 1900 no one knew that smoking was dangerous. By the time the knowledge…that it was dangerous had been created decades later, cigarettes had killed hundreds of millions of people. Again – if that had been an existential danger, whom could we sue? So: how can we create the knowledge to protect ourselves from existential or near existential dangers that we do not know? How to address the risk that by the time we do know, we won’t have time enough to create the requisite knowledge? The answer is: by creating general purpose knowledge – deep and fundamental knowledge – as fast as possible – the more we know of the world, the faster we can create new knowledge about novel aspects of it that turn up and become urgent. This is important – I don’t think it’s widely appreciated – the survival of our species depends absolutely on progress in fundamental research in science and on the speed at which we make progress there. And here the key thing in the medium term is understanding the theory of universal constructors, so that we shall know in principle – in theory – how to program them to produce, say, a billion space ships in a hurry customised to deflect an approaching shard of neutronium* or 10 billion doses of a new vaccine in a hurry against a sudden and deadly disease. So that’s how we deal with the third category of the unknown. By rapid progress of every kind: especially the fundamental. The fourth category is at once even more dangerous and yet, in a sense less worrisome because we already have the knowledge -at least the theoretical knowledge to deal with it. This fourth category is not the unknown – the unknowable. It’s a bit paradoxical that the unknowable is less dangerous than the merely unknown but that’s because the only thing that is unknowable is the content of explanatory knowledge that hasn’t been created yet and so the only truly dangerous things in that sense in the universe are entities that create explanatory knowledge - us - people – AGIs too are people. Now, the knowledge of how to prevent people from being dangerous is very counter intuitive – it took our species many millennia to create it but now we do have that knowledge. The only way to prevent people from being dangerous is to make them free. Specifically it is the knowledge of liberal values, individual rights, the open society, the Enlightenment and so on. In such societies, the overwhelming majority of people regardless of their hardware characteristics – are decent. Perhaps there will always be individuals who aren’t: enemies of civilisation, people who take it into their head to program a universal constructor to convert everything in sight into paperclips and they may devote their creativity to doing that – but the great majority will devote – that is the great majority of the population of such a society will devote some of their creativity to thwarting that and they will win provided they keep creating knowledge fast in order to stay ahead of the bad guys." 
 
*Note: neutronium is a kind of matter out of which neutron stars are made. It is composed entirely of neutrons and is thus exceedingly dense and would, for example, destroy a planet made of normal matter by causing severe gravitational effects on the planet (by, say, converting all of the planet itself into neutronium if it came in contact with the planet). 
 
 
 

On a recent “Making Sense” podcast with Sam Harris, Dr. Nicolas Christakis called for the closing of schools across the United States. Dr. Christakis list of qualifications is extensive: a sociologist and physician, the director of the “Human Nature” lab researching the ways in which (and presumably extent to which) evolution drives human behavior. He has an M.D and a PhD (in sociology). Crucially, he has worked in epidemiology. At a time such as the corona crisis of 2020, he must have much to offer so if he says “close the schools” we should listen: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/does-closing-schools-slow-spread-novel-coronavirus
 
On another recent “The Joe Rogan” podcast, Dr Michael Osterholm called for schools NOT to be closed. See that podcast or here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/03/09/is-it-really-good-idea-close-schools-fight-coronavirus/ Dr Osterholm likewise, among his considerable qualifications, lists “epidemiologist”. Unlike Dr. Christakis, however, Dr. Osterholm lists little else among his interests. He is a specialist, not a generalist. He is, crucially, Director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. His life’s work seems to be devoted to: infectious disease epidemics and is a consultant to the World Health Organisation on this.
 
Dr Amesh Adalja has been more prominent in the media than almost any other expert on COVID-19. He has appeared on The Yaron Brook Show, The Rubin Report, Making Sense, Fox News, CNN and many more besides. He consults with John Hopkins University and has devoted his life to pandemics and biosecurity. He is, again, a very narrow specialist. He has advised against closing schools in a somewhat weaker sense than Dr Osterholm: https://www.livescience.com/should-schools-close-for-coronavirus.html(Other experts at that link agree with the stronger stance of Osterholm)
 
In Australia, Dr. Norman Swan advises the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and has been prominent in the media. He is a physician and journalist who has appeared on a number of popular television programs including “The Biggest Loser” measuring contestants’ “bio age” and comparing it to their “calendar age”. He is across many areas of medicine. He is a generalist. He has repeatedly called on the government to “close the schools” and does not vacillate about it: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-15/dr-norman-swan-recommends-proactive-national-lockdown/12057956 or here: https://au.news.yahoo.com/health-expert-blasts-government-for-keeping-schools-open-093418822.html
 
The “close the schools argument” seems like common sense. After all: kept in a confined space, won’t a single infected student infect all the others? Wouldn’t it be safer to keep them home? “Why don’t they just” questions are aplenty in these times. So "Why don't they just" close the schools?
 
The argument against closing the schools is harder to make. 

1. If the schools are closed children, who may be infected but show few symptoms, are now, possibly, on the streets. Especially if they are teenagers. Not all parents can “keep their kids inside”. It’s a simple fact, the reality – some number of young people will be at the shops, walking around in the community. They will, by and large, be fine. But the elderly that may cross their paths? The number of severe cases and deaths may increase.
2. Young children need to be cared for. Who will care for them if not the school teachers? Doctors, nurses, ambulance officers, first responders, pharmacists, other hospital workers, medical receptionists, supermarket workers, etc etc may now be forced to stay home to care for their children.

 
It is no sin to be a generalist. I call myself one. And in truth there is no “pure specialist”. But it does take all sorts and some people are far more specialized than others and this is never more true than in medicine. I have no expertise whatsoever in epidemiology (nor indeed any kind of medicine) but if I can, perhaps, claim some modest expertise in anything at all, it might be expertise in experts. I make this claim having spent much time speaking with geologists and geophysicists, astronomers, cosmologist and astrophysicists, chemists and philosophers, theoretical physicists and experimental physicists, medicos of a couple of kinds, lawyers of other kinds, engineers and so on. And I’ve noticed over time certain kinds of blind spots as well as astounding levels of depth. There are some experts, among them a very good friend of mine and he won’t mind my saying – a doctor of exceedingly specialized skill that there are perhaps few in the world who can do what he does – and  who is so very careful to say when he is out of his depth on areas of medicine outside his narrow area. In the area he is an expert, he will speak with confidence and clear sighted knowledge. He seems to know the danger of making medical pronouncements about things that he covered once long ago in lectures at university or perhaps as a general surgical registrar. He simply recognizes he may not be “up to date” with the latest on whatever medical trouble his friends decide to trouble him with on any particular day. His day to day work is about particular organs and particular troubles and while no area of medicine is utterly disconnected from another, he knows there are others out there to defer to when the organ, mere centimeters away, isn’t the one he is known for treating.
 
But he is one kind of expert. There are others, and the medical community is not immune to this, where they feel obliged to make public policy pronouncements when the airwaves are already thick with opinions from actual highly specialized experts. Now should such non-specialist “experts” be shut down? Of course not. But it makes things very difficult for the populace and then for actual authorities (the government) to explain clearly the best policy given the best information. It does not take long, in my experience, for astronomers as a group, to be very willing to give all kinds of advice (and it’s usually always the same) when it comes to economics, public policy, climate policy, university administration and so on. There can be a kind of group think among these experts when it comes to areas outside their narrow field of day-to-day work. And, seemingly, the more specialized they become, the more their other opinions tend to conform to the “man-on-the-street” view. That’s not always a bad thing, but perhaps there is a kind of “creativity limit” where they have exhausted their creative thinking for the day whilst at work and when it comes to other matters they fall back onto more prominent memes circulating among their colleagues. It can certainly make the work day easier and socializing with peers less fraught with friction if ones other ideas conform. There are sociological forces at play, of course. But this phenomenon rarely has any serious effects – but in a time of crisis it may be deadly.
 
The word “expert” is a sliding scale. I trust none of them. But then I have taken on Fox Mulder’s maxim “trust no one” to the core. An expert is someone whom I know (fallibly, as always) has gone though experiences and gained the knowledge via a process of error correction through encounters with reality in the narrow domain within which they call themselves an expert. People like Dr Osterholm and Dr Adalja are the real deal. They are actual infectious disease experts who have worked on outbreaks like SARS-1, MERS and Ebola and tested their theories in the field with WHO and the CDC and so on. They have not merely read the literature or know the theory or kept up to date with the latest texts. They have been actively involved in situations before that are the closest thing to what we face now - at the coal face on these kinds of things. The average M.D, “General Practioner” or even PhD in epidemiology or (especially!) PhD in Mathematical Modelling of Epidemics are not the primary people for government (and media, mind you) to be consulted. Not in the first instance. Secondary people: sure. Helpful in some general sense to critique the primary critiques. But they should seek to clarify not add to the noise and at a time like this, not publicly “think on their feet”. And they should be challenged whenever their pronouncements diverge from that of the primary experts. At best the secondary people should act as knowledgeable conduits of the primary people. If they think they have better ideas: wonderful. They should not be backward in coming forward. But they should likewise have first considered what those primary experts have said. The secondary people should have gone through a careful process of error correction alone, or with their close circle of collegues before going public with some kind of advise to government and others with things like “close the schools” when the top tier specialist people are saying otherwise.
 
Not all people called experts are expert in the specific thing in question. Not all are highly specialized and have devoted their life to, essentially, one thing and had it tested in reality and not merely in some theoretical model. And no expert is an “authority” which is to say: none should ever have the power to shut down debate or direct people against their will. No one should ever do that.
 
However, in a democracy, we have elected officials – politicians – who we have decided can exercise such a power in a crisis. This power should never be delegated and should be used only in extremis. We are not yet “in extremis”. Times are urgent and the word “crisis” is apt. But this is no time to leave behind a sensible concern about which people we can best assume have the knowledge to guide us through.
 
It is rather like we are all on an Airbus A-380 and the announcement comes over the PA system from the chief steward “This is an emergency. There is a fire in an engine and (by remarkable coincidence) the 4 pilots have all fallen gravely ill. We must make an emergency landing. Are there any pilots on board?”
 
5 people step forward to help. 
 
The first is a mathematician who has flown 10,000 hours on an A-380 flight simulator.
 
The second is a light aircraft pilot with 5000 hours experience in a Cessna.
 
The third is a Learjet pilot with 8000 hours experience.
 
The fourth (you can see where I am going with this) is an A-320 captain who is learning to fly the A-380 and has clocked up 1000 hours.
 
And the fifth is Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny - a 15000+ hours experience A-380 Qantas pilot being shuttled back to his home airport and who successfully landed QF-32 when one of the engines caught fire in 2010.
 
It is a wonderful thing the passengers are so fortunate that day to have such a wealth of people to advise them. But though experts according to some broad definition of the word, they are not all "equal" by any means. There is clearly a “best person for the job”.
 
Without the fifth person, I would happily take the advice of number 4. But given the fifth person, and given I know nothing about how to fly a jet of any kind, if there is a dispute between number 5 and any of the others (or even all of the others) I will defer to number 5. Even better if I can understand the debate and 5 sounds reasonable. This is no matter of consensus because the 400 passengers on board may well be serious adherents of the religion of the Spaghetti monster and may vote to turn off the engines and attempt a safe glide into the holy Spaghetti pond.
 
And we need not “obey” the expert here as an authority. Upon safely landing, should our number 5 A-380 Captain then proclaim, upon the tarmac, to indefinately remain on board and wait patiently for the fire brigade as flames began to lick at the windows, I would disobey and help others seek to open the emergency escape for I know enough about aircraft and fuel tanks and fires to know that time is of the essence. I need no "expert" for that kind of thing. There are good reasons to defy an expert (see the actions of the Captain of the South Korean tragedy of the "Sewol ferry" for more on that kind of thing.) Experts can be wrong just like the rest of us but unlike the rest of us are more able to reliably and routinely convey to the rest of us the best available knowledge at any given time. They are not there as inerrant authorities and they should not be expected never to err. That too is a hazard of the “authority” moniker. It means that if the “authoritative expert” makes an error – as surely they will like the rest of us – they should not be blamed unless they have done less than their best. For their best really will be THE best at the given time. That’s what it means to be an expert. They too can fail. 
 
So should we close the schools or not? The striking thing about the split among the experts is that the more specialized in infectious disease outbreaks, it seems the more likely the expert is to advise “no” with caveats and a seeming willingness to change if new evidence is found. But with the generalists: the trend seems to be to advise “close them now” with few caveats. But those generalists risk little because in general they aren’t advising those making those calls. 
 
But we should be there to back them to try again, and again, because at times like this, that’s our best bet.

I was driven to this post by running out of toilet paper and being unable to find any at supermarkets near my house so walked in the rain to the next suburb over to only have to push past people filling whole trolleys with packets of 9 double length rolls as shelf stackers restocked…
 
Have an opinion on the severity of this virus after listening to an expert. Like this guy. He is a scientist who specializes in viruses like this and advises the US government on outbreaks like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhYcbo7rqEQ
 
I think everyone who wants to venture strong opinions on this virus - including having strong opinions on whether to stockpile things - should either be an expert or watch someone who is, like this guy. But if you cannot do that much, here are some takeaways:
 
The death rate for Corona (COVID-19) way way less than 1%.

Over 80% of cases are mild…many people won’t even realize their 2-day long sniffle was corona-19.

Its R0 value (how contagious it is = how many people an infected person will typically infect) is relatively low at 2.0 to 2.4. Measles, for example, has an R0 = 15.
 
Politicians shouldn’t comment on things they have no idea about. Eg: when Bernie Sanders criticized a pharmaceutical company some time ago, so they stopped working on a vaccine for a related virus due to all the bad publicity…so we don’t have all the vaccines we might have had.
 
Wild animals are a key way these viruses spread. All corona viruses originate in bats but then end up in some other animals and only then in people. Eg: MERS which was a worse form of corona was transmitted by camels. MERS had a 35% death rate but was far far more difficult to spread human-to-human but EASY to spread camel-human. 
 
There is a “severity bias” with COVID-19. This means you only hear about the very small number of severe cases because they end up in hospital being tested. Most people who get it – you included – would probably never know you had it.
 
In 2009 the H1N1 virus looks like it was worse. In the US alone well over 200,000 infections and 12,000 deaths. This new one looks to be “mild to moderate” – it won’t “go away”. Viruses are just a part of life. This coronavirus may end up “endemic”: we may just have to live with it for years.
 
The Australian government is overreacting. We cannot contain it. We just have to be resilient and help the rare people who get really sick. Politicians tend not to get punished for over reacting on these things. But they should. China overreacted majorly, according to this expert, because the virus could never be contained and now it sets a bad example for other countries and when it breaks through the containment people will think that containment never works. It does…but not for this virus.
 
Masks are not needed for the general public.
 
This virus is especially not severe for children.
 
Wash your hands.
 
Modern healthcare systems really reduce fatality rates. Eg: ebola was thought to have a 90% death rate….but simply giving people IV fluids in a hospital reduced that number to 20%.
 
The main effect on the economy is due to misinformed shutdowns by the government.

Stop panicking.