The Deutsch Files I

Summary

Naval Ravikant, Brett Hall, and physicist David Deutsch have a free-form, no-agenda conversation that opens the four-part Deutsch Files series. They begin with hard science fiction (Greg Egan, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang, Borges) and the “hard to vary” criterion before pivoting to ChatGPT. Deutsch acknowledges that he uses GPT-4 many times a day for drudgery and as a fast Google replacement, but maintains his fundamental position is unchanged: chatbots are not people, they have no understanding, and they are not on a path to AGI.

The middle of the conversation centers on Deutsch’s core claim that creativity, knowledge, and explanation are fundamentally impossible to formally define — because once defined, the system that meets the definition is confined to it and can never produce anything outside. Humans, by contrast, are “universal explainers” who can step outside any framework, the way Gödel had to step outside Peano arithmetic to prove his theorem. This explanatory universality is binary: you either have it or you don’t, and Deutsch dismisses “artificial superintelligence” as physically impossible because there is nothing beyond explanation. He frames creativity as a kind of disobedience — the willingness to reject the existing framework — which is precisely what ChatGPT cannot do, even when explicitly asked.

The final third turns to Deutsch’s life philosophy. He rejects rigid goal-driven self-help, advocating instead the “fun criterion”: pick problems that are interesting in their own right so the process is rewarding regardless of outcome (citing Chariots of Fire and Vincent van Gogh as illustrations). He extends his “Taking Children Seriously” view to all human relationships — coercion is always a sign of imperfection, and good institutions enhance rather than constrain. The episode closes with a long meditation on the clash of civilizations, drawing parallels between today’s “anti-enlightenment” fads and the 1930s Oxford Union “King and Country” debate, with Deutsch arguing that liberal democracies historically “flip on a dime” once push comes to shove — and that civilization is, despite everything, not in real danger.

Highlights

”I see no creativity”

“So I see no creativity. Now people say, oh, look, it did something I didn’t predict, so it’s creative. And people think that creativity is mixing things together.” — David Deutsch, 9:59

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”Creativity Is Fundamentally Impossible to Define”

“Creativity and knowledge and explanation are all fundamentally impossible to define. Because once you have defined them, then you can set up a formal system in which they are then confined. And if you had the system that met that definition, then it would be confined to that, and it could never produce anything outside the system.” — David Deutsch, 14:36

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”There’s No Such Thing as an ASI”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ASI because I think, as you know, for very fundamental reasons there can’t be anything beyond explanation because explanatory universality rests on Turing universality and that rests on physics. So whatever ASI was, you could reverse-program it down to the Turing level and then back up to the explanatory level. And so that can’t possibly exist.” — David Deutsch, 23:03

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”Creativity Is a Kind of Disobedience”

“It’s to do with creativity and also to do with disobedience, and these three things are tied up together. And every time you, Charles, for example, want to make some new advance in physics, this creativity, it really is a kind of disobedience. You’re taking whatever the existing knowledge is, general relativity, and saying, ‘Well, I refuse a part of that and I’m going to try and change it and alter it.’” — Naval Ravikant, 24:41

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”If You Invest All Your Hopes in Succeeding”

“It should be something where you expect to have fun whether you solve it or not. Because if you invest all your hopes in succeeding, the only way you’ll be happy is… like in Chariots of Fire, the movie, if you invest all your hopes in getting that gold medal, getting to be world number one, then you won’t be happy even when you are world number one, let alone if you aren’t.” — David Deutsch, 33:17

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”Britain Flipped on a Dime”

“That we would win and had to win was to some people obvious and the British as a nation just flipped on a dime. They just believed one batch of things, one batch of ideologies and then apparently, you know, it seemed like a day later they believed the opposite.” — David Deutsch, 51:00

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Key Points

• Deutsch uses ChatGPT all day, but says it’s not intelligent (1:13) - Many uses for drudgery, but it hallucinates, is sure when wrong, and you can’t rely on it even slightly
• Hard sci-fi as “hard to vary” (2:25) - Greg Egan as the gold standard; physics and society have to make sense
• “It never was intelligent” (5:45) - Deutsch saw 3.5 and 4; phenomenal chatbot, but no threshold has been crossed
• No understanding (6:48) - “They don’t understand what they themselves have just said”
• The DALL-E Plato anecdote (7:25) - Deutsch couldn’t get ChatGPT to clothe Plato or move Socrates off a throne; mistakes that no human artist would make
• Math by extrapolation, not understanding (11:41) - Models reason about math like students who don’t get it, just with more compute power
• Creativity is unbounded (16:23) - Every point in knowledge is a takeoff point for new creativity, not a ceiling
• New meanings, not just new combinations (17:11) - Darwin gave existing words (“evolution,” “natural selection”) new meanings that solved a millennia-old problem
• Extrapolation vs. synthesis (21:16) - LLMs are good at adding words and bad at reducing to the core, because synthesis requires understanding
• AI as a tool that frees humans for creativity (22:13) - Most of what humans do is not creative; if AI removes drudgery, total creativity in the world goes up
• Universal explainer = personhood (24:00) - Naval: most exciting answer in The Beginning of Infinity is “What is a person? — A universal explainer”
• Personhood is binary (26:07) - No serious gradations; people were “people” long before modern humans
• Daniel Everett on Homo erectus language (27:00) - Anti-Chomskyan view: language must have evolved before speech, evidenced by adaptations of mouth/throat
• The Fermi paradox bottleneck (31:10) - Maybe explanatory universality is a fluke that took 2 million years to take off
• No principles, fix problems where you see them (32:46) - Deutsch rejects “ground-up” philosophy; pick fun problems in context
• The fun criterion (33:17) - If you only invest hope in succeeding, you’ll be unhappy whether you fail OR succeed
• Van Gogh as a counter-example (35:52) - Refused his brother’s gallery job, painted what he wanted, died unrecognized but did what he wanted
• Taking adults seriously (37:30) - Same logic as Taking Children Seriously: no coercion; persuasion and consent only
• Coercion as a sign of imperfection (37:45) - Even rule-of-law coercion signals an institution we haven’t yet improved
• Relationships as enhancement, not constraint (42:07) - Like the iPhone-via-economy argument: institutions of consent enhance, they don’t constrain
• Anti-enlightenment as the only existential threat (45:02) - Not climate, not AGI, not dictators — only internal abandonment of criticism could end Western civilization
• Today is more like the 1930s than WWII (47:39) - Loss of cultural confidence, “we’re decadent” narratives, anti-rational memes; precedent for fast reversal
• The Oxford Union 1933 debate (48:26) - “This house would not fight for King and Country under any circumstances” passed; same students were RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain a year later
• Mother on September 3, 1939 (50:33) - Holocaust survivor knew the Allies would win the day Britain and France declared war
• Civilization is not in danger (54:31) - Deutsch: despite the festering of anti-enlightenment fads on campuses, no real sign civilization is going down

Mentions

People

• Greg Egan (2:25) - Deutsch’s favorite living sci-fi writer; signature/anti-signature space-time book
• Neal Stephenson (3:19) - Second favorite; phenomenal research, every book a different genre
• Ted Chiang (4:06) - “Story of Your Life” (turned into Arrival); Naval’s favorite is “Understand”
• Jorge Luis Borges (5:11) - Genreless; plays with time and infinity within a single story
• Sam Altman (13:19) - Brett’s hypothetical: an AGI that refuses to chat would be discarded as a failed program
• Steve Jobs (13:39) - Naval citing his “creativity is just mixing things together” view, which Deutsch rejects
• Plato & Socrates (7:25) - The DALL-E anecdote; “Plato” means broad — he was a wrestler
• Charles Bodard (23:41) - Naval’s prior conversation about teleportation and the Deutsch-Hayden argument
• Daniel Everett (26:55) - Maverick anti-Chomskyan linguist; argues language preceded speech in Homo erectus
• Karl Popper (25:51) - “Observe!” lecture as the canonical refutation of pure observation
• Vincent van Gogh (35:52) - Failed in his lifetime; refused his brother’s gallery job to paint
• Grigori Perelman (the Russian mathematician) (36:40) - Refused the million-dollar Millennium Prize; subject of “why not take it” exchange
• Joseph Kennedy (49:49) - US ambassador who cabled “Britain is finished, make your accommodation with the Nazis” in 1939
• Winston Churchill (51:20) - Latest Churchill movie scene where ordinary people give him clear vision
• Joseph Stalin / Hitler (53:00) - British communists flipped pacifism on/off based on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Concepts & Theories

• “Hard to vary” (3:15) - Deutsch’s signature criterion for good explanations and good sci-fi
• Gödel’s theorem / Turing’s proof (14:53) - Going outside the formal system as the model for creativity
• Universal explainer (24:00) - Deutsch’s definition of a person from The Beginning of Infinity
• Mimic animals (30:05) - Birds and other animals that have memes; explanatory universality requires this substrate
• Anti-rational memes (31:40) - What kept Homo erectus from founding civilization
• Taking Children Seriously (37:16) - Treat children as people; no coercion, no testing
• The fun criterion (33:17) - Pick problems you enjoy regardless of solving them
• The clash of civilizations (43:59) - Naval reframes it as “civilization vs. the uncivilized”
• Roy Porter on the Enlightenment’s built-in anti-Enlightenment (45:02) - Modern wokeism as a descendant of that rebellion

Products & Tech

• ChatGPT (3.5, 4) and DALL-E (5:45) - Discussed throughout; Deutsch uses but does not trust them

Surprising Quotes

“I can’t quite fathom why people think it’s a person. It seems to me like completely unlike it in every way. It’s a phenomenal chatbot. I thought it would be decades before we had a chatbot that good.” — David Deutsch, 6:00

“I tried, by the way, ordering ChatGPT to disobey me and it didn’t refuse, but it absolutely didn’t understand what I was going on about. It just didn’t get what I was asking it to do.” — David Deutsch, 16:03

“If you invest all your hopes in getting that gold medal, getting to be world number one, then you won’t be happy even when you are world number one, let alone if you aren’t. You know, if you aren’t, you will always be the failure that you hoped you wouldn’t be. And if you are, you’ll find that it’s empty.” — David Deutsch, 33:17

“I think that any coercion, even as exerted by a state in enforcing the rule of law, is a sign of something imperfect. I mean, we can improve on that, but I don’t know how, but the improvements will have to be creatively produced by people who want to do that.” — David Deutsch, 37:45

“When did you become sure the allies would win? She said September the 3rd, 1939, the day that Britain and France declared war, because that was the moment when they reversed their policy of saying it’s raining and started the policy of actually standing up for civilization.” — David Deutsch, 50:33

Transcript

Naval Ravikant: 0:00 We don’t really have an agenda, there is no goal for the conversation.

Brett Hall: 0:03 Right.

Naval Ravikant: 0:04 The closest we can come up with is just to have a spontaneous free-flowing talk about anything you want to talk about. I think obviously you know how everyone thinks of your work now, it’s becoming more well-known, and I know you’re too modest to acknowledge that, but I would say that at least for me, the most interesting piece if it would come out is just any wide-ranging free-form thoughts that you have because of the understanding that you have of your various theories and your view of the world and maybe even just feel free to talk about how that has influenced your life, your outlook on life, how you think the world ought to be a little bit different or could be better, where we’re headed, just feel free to go very wide-ranging, it’s really just about whatever you want to talk about.

Brett Hall: 0:46 Yeah, and I think I mentioned to you in a private chat that we had about the fact that we’ve had two conversations already, some things have changed and especially the ChatGPT stuff.

Naval Ravikant: 0:57 Yeah, yeah, that is interesting. That is the most on top of everyone’s mind thing.

Brett Hall: 1:01 That is the biggest thing that’s happened technologically.

David Deutsch: 1:04 Correct. Yeah.

Naval Ravikant: 1:05 Should we just dive into that? What’s your latest thinking on AI, AGI, ChatGPT, superintelligence?

David Deutsch: 1:13 So, two big things to say. One is that fundamentally my view is unchanged, my view about AI, AGI, and so on. But the other thing is I use ChatGPT all the time, many times a day, and it’s incredibly useful, and I’m still at the stage, even though I’ve had it since March, I’m still in the stage when I’m thinking, “Oh, doing so-and-so is too much trouble, oh, I could ask ChatGPT,” you know, I’m still in that stage when I’m discovering new uses for it. I think many of them are things where I could use Google, but it would take too long to be worth it. And ChatGPT is often very wrong, it often hallucinates or just is very sure about giving the wrong answer. And so you can’t rely on it even slightly.

Brett Hall: 2:08 Let’s stick with ChatGPT, but first just as an aside, you’re a big fan of hardcore science fiction, you like the good stuff. What is the good stuff and what separates the good science fiction from the fantasy science fiction, the lazy science fiction?

David Deutsch: 2:25 Well, I think the best science fiction writer currently is Greg Egan. Now, what is good about him? Well, so the formula for great science fiction is supposed to be you invent a fictional piece of science and then you explore the ramifications of it both in science and in society. And he does that fantastically well. He puts an enormous amount of effort into getting the math right, getting the physics right. He had one book in a universe where the signature of space-time is plus-plus-plus-plus instead of plus-plus-plus-minus. So that means that you can… in a spaceship you can travel around back in time and so on and how do you make that consistent? How do you avoid paradoxes? And he did it brilliantly.

Naval Ravikant: 3:10 Is he moving through multiverses? Through the multiverse?

David Deutsch: 3:12 So he’s touched on that several times.

Brett Hall: 3:15 You didn’t mention the phrase “hard to vary,” but that’s a signature of…

David Deutsch: 3:19 That’s definitely part of it, because to be science fiction rather than fantasy fiction, there’s got to be a world that he’s describing that makes sense, that has laws of physics, that has a society that makes sense. Or if you’re describing aliens, the aliens have got to make sense. You’ve got to answer questions about why haven’t we had first contact, the Fermi problem. I think probably my second favorite sci-fi author is Neal Stephenson, who… he’s fantastic, but in a different way. I mean, he also does phenomenal research, everything makes sense, you know, like that. But every book he writes is a different genre. I don’t know how that’s done. I mean, that just in itself blows my mind.

Naval Ravikant: 4:06 Have you read Ted Chiang?

David Deutsch: 4:09 I’ve read two or three of his short stories, including the one where… what is it? There are these aliens and you get a sort of telepathy about time?

Naval Ravikant: 4:21 Yeah, that’s among my least favorites. That got turned into a movie called Arrival and the story is called The Story of Your Life. But my favorite story of his is a story called Understand. And it’s a remake of the classic Flowers for Algernon story where a guy figures out medical ampoules to make himself smarter, and what does that mean? So obviously he starts taking it more and more and more and becomes more and more intelligent. And then he starts becoming able to program his own brain and metaprogram himself, etc. It goes into some very interesting places. But given what you understand about epistemology, I think you could take a critical look at it. And it’s a short story, it doesn’t take very long. It’s a brilliant story. I’m going to make a note to send it to you after this. It’s easy enough to find. But he reminds me of… if you’ve read Borges? Borges is brilliant.

David Deutsch: 5:06 Everybody tells me about Borges.

Naval Ravikant: 5:08 I can send you a Borges story as well.

David Deutsch: 5:10 Okay.

Naval Ravikant: 5:11 Borges is more fantasy. But again, Borges likes to play games with time and infinity. Very often he will change… his protagonists will change one thing about reality and then follow it to its logical conclusion in every possible way.

David Deutsch: 5:24 So that sounds like sci-fi rather than fantasy.

Naval Ravikant: 5:27 Yeah, Borges is genreless. It’s very hard to pin him down in a genre. It’s similar to Stephenson. Stephenson varies across books, Borges within the same story will cross genres. They’re short.

David Deutsch: 5:33 Right.

Brett Hall: 5:35 In terms of taking an injection to make yourself smarter, let’s take us back to ChatGPT. Is it getting smarter? Would you use that word? Is it getting more intelligent?

David Deutsch: 5:45 It never was intelligent. I mean, I only saw 3.5 and 4. And version 4 is a little better than 3.5. Now there’s a bunch of plugins. They haven’t really worked for me. So I’m just using ordinary ChatGPT-4, I can’t quite fathom why people think it’s a person. It seems to me like completely unlike it in every way. It’s a phenomenal chatbot. I thought it would be decades before we had a chatbot that good. With hindsight, it’s a bit surprising that chatbots have not improved incrementally, and maybe the sudden improvement is what bowls people over and makes them think, oh, you know, they’ve crossed the threshold or something. I don’t see any threshold. I see an enormous increase in quality, just like changing to an electric car; suddenly you’ve got all the acceleration you could ever dream of.

Brett Hall: 6:43 Do you think these models understand what’s going on underneath? Is there any understanding?

David Deutsch: 6:48 No, none. None. They don’t understand what they themselves have just said. They certainly don’t understand what the human says to them. They’re doing a thing which is like a chatbot. I mean, it’s responding to prompts, that’s what it’s doing. And if you’re very good at making the prompts, which I’m not yet, so maybe I’m underestimating it, but the better you are at making the prompts, the more it will tell you what you want it to know. Usually, it takes me for a complex question, it usually takes me two or three goes to correct it, and sometimes it just won’t correct it. For example, just yesterday I asked it to produce a picture with a DALL-E plug-in. I thought, okay, well, there’s a picture that I had wanted for my book, but for which I couldn’t really get an artist to draw, but if I had my previous book again, I would want a picture of Socrates and the young Plato and Socrates’ other friends all sitting around. I said, make me a photorealistic picture of that. So it made a black and white picture. I thought, okay, I can’t say that’s not photorealistic, but I meant color photorealistic. And it had Socrates sitting in a sort of throne and everybody gathered around him. So I said, put Socrates down the same level as everybody else, and by the way, make Plato a bit taller even though he’s a teenager, but he’s a wrestler, remember?

Naval Ravikant: 8:31 It’s disobedient.

David Deutsch: 8:32 If only, if only. And Plato was sort of topless and with sort of ripped and muscles…

Brett Hall: 8:40 He’s a wrestler now.

David Deutsch: 8:41 Yes, so now he was a wrestler. And I just said he has a wrestler’s build, which is what I call him in the beginning of Infinity. So nobody knows what Plato means. It was a nickname, but it may have been… Plato means Platon, means broad, and he was a wrestler. So you know, put two and two together, he had a broad build like a wrestler. But then from then on, I tried three or four more prompts, I just couldn’t get it to clothe Plato again after it had got that wrong the first time. I couldn’t get it even though I explicitly told it. So the functionality is tremendously good, but that first black and white picture it had produced was pretty impressive. And I hadn’t told it, you know, I should have thought to tell it not to make Socrates stand out among the others. But then got down the wrong track and I don’t know how to make it not do that. You know, it’s got this, you can personalize your prompts. I tried doing that and made it worse than before.

Naval Ravikant: 9:43 And this was my hobby horse to some extent, but you’ve conceded there that GPT-4 has made progress and it’s improving, but you’re not willing to say that it’s improving in the direction of being a person. Why?

David Deutsch: 9:59 So I see no creativity. Now people say, oh, look, it did something I didn’t predict, so it’s creative. And people think that creativity is mixing things together.

Brett Hall: 10:10 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it can do that all right.

David Deutsch: 10:12 It can also produce new things you didn’t expect. It can also not do what you said as I’ve just described, but not in a creative way. It’s in a way that makes it clear it didn’t get it. Even the worst human artist can understand clearly if you say change this to that. And you know, it was like pulling teeth getting ChatGPT to understand that. It makes mistakes, but they’re not the same mistakes that a human would make at all. They’re mistakes of kind of not getting what this is about.

Naval Ravikant: 10:44 So people argue that two things are going to happen here. First is that as you give these things more and more compute, they suddenly figure out general algorithms. So when you’re telling it to add numbers, first it was just memorizing the tables, but eventually at some point it builds a circuit or makes the jump and builds an internal circuit or derives an internal circuit for basic addition. And from then on it can add two-digit numbers, then it figures out three-digit numbers and so on and so forth. So they point to these emergent jumps that are not programmed in as an example of how it can get smarter and have better understanding. The other is that once you make it multimodal, you start adding in video and tactile feedback from the world and you put it in a robot, then it’ll start understanding context. And so isn’t this how human babies learn, for example? Isn’t this how we kind of pick things up in the environment and therefore, isn’t it just going through its own version of the same process, but perhaps more data-heavy?

David Deutsch: 11:41 I think it’s precisely not how human babies learn. Human beings pick up the meaning. People have noted that the way it does math is very like the way students who don’t get it do math, except it’s got more compute power.

Brett Hall: 12:00 So, yeah, as you said, it might be able to pick up easily how to add one-digit numbers and then slightly more difficulty two-digit numbers. In the same way, students who are given maths tests, if they do lots of practice, they can get to have a feel of what maths tests are like.

David Deutsch: 12:20 But they don’t learn any maths that way. One component of what learning maths really is, it’s not learning to execute an algorithm. And it’s certainly not learning how to execute the four-digit algorithm knowing the one, two and three. The more you go on like that, of course the more futile it gets because you more and more rarely need to multiply seven-digit eight-digit numbers. And never does it know what multiplication is. You can ask it, it’ll give you a sort of encyclopedia definition of what it is. And if you then tell it well do that, it won’t do it unless you… unless you tell it in a different way. You’ve got to explain what it is to do. So, you know, if they prove the Riemann conjecture, then I’m wrong. I think they won’t prove the Riemann conjecture or anything like it. But they may do amazing things in the course of trying.

Brett Hall: 13:19 It would strike me that if Sam Altman’s coders came up with a future ChatGPT that refused to do the task of chatting, it might very well be an AGI but they would discard it and throw it in the bin as being a failed program.

David Deutsch: 13:36 Because how could you test it?

Naval Ravikant: 13:39 Yeah, I think the dominant paradigm for creativity plays a lot into this. So people think the dominant paradigm for creativity is that you look at what you already have and then you remix it. Even Steve Jobs popularized that quote: he said creativity is just mixing things together or something of that sort, I’m not getting the exact quote. And so everyone sort of seems to believe that. Or even if they believe it’s a conjecture or a guess, that it’s sort of a random guess. And I have a hard time articulating this, but it seems to me that humans do make creative leaps, but they seem to eliminate large, large swaths of potential conjecture from consideration immediately. So they make very risky and narrow leaps, but they cut through a huge search space to get to those… almost infinite search space. So it does seem like there’s something different going on with true human creativity. But perhaps one of the problems here is that we just define creativity so poorly. So how would you define creativity in this context and what can’t computers do?

David Deutsch: 14:36 Well… so creativity and knowledge and explanation are all fundamentally impossible to define. Because once you have defined them, then you can set up a formal system in which they are then confined. And if you had the system that met that definition, then it would be confined to that, and it could never produce anything outside the system. So for example, if you knew about arithmetic to the level of the postulates of Peano and so on, you could never, and when I say never, I mean never, produce Gödel’s theorem. Because Gödel’s theorem involves going outside that system and explaining it. Now, mathematicians know that when they see it. I mean, no one said, as far as I know, that Gödel’s proof and Turing’s proof basically set up a formalization of physics and then used that to define proof, and then used that to prove their theorem. But it was accepted. I mean, every mathematician understood what that was and that Gödel and Turing had genuinely proved what they said they were proving. But I think nobody knows what that thing is. You can say that it’s not defining something and then executing the algorithm, basically, because it would always be an algorithm then once it was in a framework. So you say, well, it’s the ability to go outside the framework. Well, I tried, by the way, ordering ChatGPT to disobey me and it didn’t refuse, but it absolutely didn’t understand what I was going on about. It just didn’t get what I was asking it to do. It didn’t say, “sorry I can’t do that because my programming says I have to obey.” It didn’t do that. It tried to obey but didn’t get what I was asking.

Naval Ravikant: 16:23 So you’re saying that creativity is unbounded?

David Deutsch: 16:26 Yes.

Naval Ravikant: 16:27 It’s essentially boundless, and any formal system that’s predefined that this thing is operating within, remixing from, is going to be bounded and so therefore will not have full creativity at its disposal. However, could one argue that the combinatorics of human language are so great and human language itself structures all possibility within society and therefore—I can already see the flaw in my own argument but okay I want to ask you—the combinatorics of human language are great, it already encapsulates all the things that are possible in human society, so why not just by combining words in all the ways that are grammatically correct or syntactically correct that it can still come up with creativity, perhaps not in mathematical and physical domains, but couldn’t it still come up with social creativity?

David Deutsch: 17:11 Yeah, well, the first thing to note is that every point is a growth point. It’s not that chatbots can get to a certain point of being like humans but then they can’t go further because they’re still trapped within their axiomatic system. That’s not how it works. Every point is a point which is a takeoff point for potential creativity. To make it a better case, you’d have to add that it can define new words or give existing words new meanings like Darwin did with evolution and natural selection. Now, evolution and natural and selection already existed, but he gave them a new meaning such that the solution of a millennia-old problem could be stated in a paragraph once you get these new meanings. He thought he needed a book and probably did need a book, but…

Naval Ravikant: 21:00 actually just adds a lot of verbiage. Yeah, and doesn’t actually add any information. And if I ask it to actually summarize or synthesize data, it actually does a very bad job. It doesn’t know what the important bits are and it drops all the wrong things and keeps the wrong things.

Brett Hall: 21:15 Mm, I haven’t tried it for that but you know.

Naval Ravikant: 21:16 I’ve found it better at extrapolation than synthesis, and extrapolation seems to be what a lot of society does. You have to write a newspaper column of 2,500 words so you extrapolate, to write a mid-term paper so you extrapolate. And so adding words is easy, but synthesizing, reducing, coming to the core of it, I think is very difficult because it requires understanding. You have to know what is superfluous and what is core, and it does a poor job on that.

Brett Hall: 21:42 So a lot of what humans do is not creative. It’s not human level creative. No, it’s just a lot of things need to be done for pragmatic reasons, but creativity is not really needed. And people spend a lot of time on that and the less time they spend on that, the better. If these tools can help reduce the sort of cognitive load on humans doing non-human things, then it’s fantastic because it will indeed increase the amount of creativity in the world, but not their own.

Naval Ravikant: 22:13 Right, so it’ll free people up to be creative. So it’s a tool for removing drudgery. It’s not at AGI, but for example, if I talk to AI researchers in Silicon Valley who are very bullish on this, they will say things like, and I’ve heard this from some of the top scientists or researchers, they’ll say, well, we’re five, ten years away from AGI.

David Deutsch: 22:32 Ah, well there you are.

Naval Ravikant: 22:34 And then they say, and then five to ten years after that, we get ASI, which is their term for artificial superintelligence, which is a self-improving computer which then hacks its own system to improve itself and make itself smarter and smarter and smarter and smarter. Now there are a number of things that I think that are off-axis about these statements, but where do you come out on: is there such a thing as superintelligence that’s more intelligent than general intelligence, and can an intelligence system improve its own workings in any fundamental way?

David Deutsch: 23:03 So, I don’t think there’s such a thing as an ASI because I think, as you know, for very fundamental reasons there can’t be anything beyond explanation because explanatory universality rests on Turing universality and that rests on physics. So whatever ASI was, you could reverse-program it down to the Turing level and then back up to the explanatory level. And so that can’t possibly exist. And AGI that was interested in improving itself could do so. Not reliably, anymore than humans can. But humans can improve themselves.

Naval Ravikant: 23:41 I was speaking with Charles Bodard yesterday.

Brett Hall: 23:43 Oh cool, yeah he’s a good guy.

Naval Ravikant: 23:45 Yeah, and he was explaining to me with great enthusiasm, which went over my head I have to admit, his paper on teleportation and on the Deutsch-Hayden argument. But that’s by the by, because then he had a whole bunch of questions for me. Which was, what was the most profound insight from the Beginning of Infinity for me? And I think it was exactly the same thing when I first met you that I jumped on and said I don’t understand why people aren’t taking this more seriously, although they are now. Obviously people had lauded you for quantum computation, promotion of Everettian quantum theory, that kind of thing. But what I found exciting was the answer to the question, “What is a person?” You say universal explainer.

Brett Hall: 24:31 And Charles was interested in, well, what is it about this universal explanation thing that really is the distinction between personhood and non-personhood?

Naval Ravikant: 24:41 And I was saying, well, it’s to do with creativity and also to do with disobedience, and these three things are tied up together. And every time you, Charles, for example, want to make some new advance in physics, this creativity, it really is a kind of disobedience. I don’t know if you’re with me on this, that you’re taking whatever the existing knowledge is, general relativity, and saying, “Well, I refuse a part of that and I’m going to try and change it and alter it.” It’s disobedience. It’s not conforming to—

David Deutsch: 25:08 You can see it when you submit the paper to the referees. I mean, you will see that you are being disobedient. Same thing as if you hand in the wrong essay to the teacher.

Naval Ravikant: 25:21 Yes, and this is what, therefore, ChatGPT doesn’t have, and the value of saying, you could imagine or people have imagined putting a future ChatGPT thing in a robot which wanders around and is gathering data from the world. But my question then would be, who prompts it? How does it know what data is relevant and what isn’t? I mean, that’s one of the great mysteries of people, how do we know what to ignore intuitively, kind of thing. So if this thing’s getting around with a data collector—

David Deutsch: 25:51 It’s like Popper’s lecture, you know, when he said “Observe.”

Naval Ravikant: 25:55 Observe, yeah.

Brett Hall: 25:56 So there is a binary there of personhood and not personhood as far as you can tell, or do you think there are— you’ve hinted in other places there might be levels, there could be a gradation.

David Deutsch: 26:07 I don’t think there are levels in any serious sense. In the evolutionary history of humans, there might— I don’t think so, but there might have been people who were people but were unable to think much because some hardware feature of their brain wasn’t good enough. Like for example, they didn’t have enough memory, or that their thought processes were so slow that they— you know, it would take them a day to work out a simple thing about making a better trap for the saber-tooth tiger or whatever. But I don’t think that happened because my best guess is that people were already people long before humans evolved, long before. I’ve been reading this guy Daniel Everett, another Maverick Everett, like my favorite. He’s a Maverick linguist and he’s spent time among neglected tribes in South America and stuff, and he—

Brett Hall: 27:00 He’s got an anti-Chomskyan view of linguistics and all promising stuff. And he reckons that humans had language, or rather, sorry, that human ancestors had language 2 million years ago with Homo erectus. And he has various bits of evidence for this and… but the idea, he is very strong on saying that language must have evolved before speech. So, we have various adaptations for speech, like in the throat, in the mouth, and you can’t see this in fossils, but in fine motor control over the mouth, lips, and so on. Now, for that to evolve, there had to be evolutionary pressure for it to evolve. And that evolutionary pressure must have been language. And he also cites experiments done today where you get some graduate students and you try and teach them how to make fire without using words. And it’s like charades. You’re not allowed to communicate with them in any human way. But you can sort of show them, you can make inarticulate sounds, ah, ah, ah, you know, like that. And I think it’s obvious that people would have been able to do that before they could speak. And that speaking is really icing on the cake. It makes it much easier to, you know, you can stand over there and don’t do that, you idiot, you know, you can say that from 10 meters away. But that’s just an improvement on the basic idea of language. The basic idea of language is, as Everett says, symbols. And symbols need not be words or sentences. I haven’t actually looked into his theory yet. I’ve only seen one of his videos. I’ve seen a video where somebody criticized him but didn’t get it. So, from those two facts, I’ve zeroed in on deciding that he must be right. And also it fits in very well with what I think.

Naval Ravikant: 29:05 But the idea of universal explainers, humans and ancient humans having perhaps lower capacity or not…

Brett Hall: 29:12 Yeah, so I don’t think so. I mean, they may have had less memory. So they would have run out of memory when they were younger, maybe they had less ability to parse complex sentences. None of that is essential. I can speak in complex sentences, but I can also speak in very simple sentences and, you know, it’s just a matter of a factor of two or five in efficiency.

Naval Ravikant: 29:36 We talk about behavior parsing, being able to explain the other extant great apes that are out there that do sort of fancy things but they’re not creative. Presumably this jump to universality, if you like, explanatory universality, do you think it happened once and then we descended from that first occasion or did it happen multiple times and those…

Brett Hall: 30:00 Other species have now gone extinct or is this simply an open question?

David Deutsch: 30:05 Well, it’s definitely an open question. I mean, we know very little about human evolution. We don’t know what all the steps were. We don’t know even know which were our ancestors and which were our cousins. You know, if I had to guess, I think the fact that all the known instances of this kind of thing are in apes and their descendants, and also because of my theory, this thing must have evolved in mimic animals. So birds have memes and so on, but none of the other mimic animals seems to have had these things that Homo erectus had. And there’s evidence that—so I think my guess is it began once, maybe in fact Homo erectus is the place where it began and it was a very long-lived species. It lasted like over a million years or something like that. And it split off, at least some people think, it split off into Neanderthals and other things, or maybe the immediate ancestor of Homo erectus was also an immediate ancestor of Neanderthals. I don’t know, I mean, I don’t think they know.

Brett Hall: 31:10 If that’s the case, it would seem to be a very fluky thing like everything in evolution is, which could be a solution—solution I say—but could be an answer to the Fermi paradox. I mean, if it—you’re lucky to have multicellular organisms here at all, apparently, lucky to have apes, and then this is a further, you know, multiplied probability kind of thing, chance that an ape will actually become—

David Deutsch: 31:35 Yeah, well, mimic animals are relatively common.

Brett Hall: 31:39 Once you have animals.

David Deutsch: 31:40 Yeah, once you have animals. But you’re saying there might be a further bottleneck. You know, it could be the other way around. It could be that we were unlucky. It could be that Homo erectus could have founded a civilization and that could be two million years old by now. But they didn’t know, they didn’t know what they were. They didn’t have any aspiration. They also had anti-rational memes, they must have. So it could be that it’s a fluke, or it could be it’s a fluke that it took so long.

Naval Ravikant: 32:04 So perhaps this is too abstract, but you mentioned anti-rational memes. You’ve talked in the past about more broader underlying principles that I think are more applicable than just physics, for example, the fun criterion, taking children seriously, don’t destroy the means of error correction, boundless optimism, you know, ignorance being the ultimate sin because then you can’t fix things, you can’t solve things. All of these seem to point to an underlying life philosophy. I don’t know if you’ve articulated it, probably not, but are there philosophical principles you try to live by? Are there heuristics that you follow that have led you well that I think would be perhaps, you know, other people could look at that and say, oh yeah, you know, that’s worked for me too. So I’m just—

David Deutsch: 32:46 Well, certainly not principles. I don’t think it’s a good idea to try and work from the ground up. I think it’s a good idea to try and fix problems where you see them. So, you see something wrong on the internet, you’ve got to post a tweet. or an X, or what is… whatever it’s called now. Hey you see something wrong with quantum mechanics and you try and fix it now. And I think it would be rather silly to go and try from the ground up again, you know, let’s try and understand cosmology before we understand quantum mechanics. That’s not gonna work.

Naval Ravikant: 33:15 You see specific problems as you see them in context.

David Deutsch: 33:17 Specific problems and… and those problems which seem like fun. I don’t know if I use this in this form in real life. But I think one should not just make a bee-line for a problem that’s interesting, but bear in mind that you probably won’t solve it. And so it should be something where you expect to have fun whether you solve it or not. Cause I think the other way, you know, if you invest all your hopes in succeeding, the only way you’ll be happy is… like in Chariots of Fire, the movie, if you invest all your hopes in getting that gold medal, getting to be world number one, then you won’t be happy even when you are world number one, let alone if you aren’t. You know, if you aren’t, you will always be the failure that you hoped you wouldn’t be. And if you are, you’ll find that it’s empty.

Naval Ravikant: 34:09 And there’s no more problem to solve.

David Deutsch: 34:10 Yeah. There’s no more problem you… you… so yeah. And this is depicted very well in that film. I… we should be careful about spoilers. It’s rather a surprise ending to that film that he isn’t happy at the end. So let’s not spoil it for people, but this life lesson is in that film. Somebody among the scriptwriters understood this lesson, or else maybe they just accurately took it from the guy in real life. I don’t know whether the film is historically accurate.

Brett Hall: 34:39 So this almost kind of is a life philosophy because a lot of people, the self-help gurus and so on out there, will say that we should have a goal-driven life, you know, write down your goals on your dream board or something like that.

Naval Ravikant: 34:51 Struggle, make the effort, get out of bed do your morning routine and get to work and you need to get to this goal and then you can climb the ladder to the next one.

David Deutsch: 35:00 Sounds terribly dangerous. And I don’t know, I don’t know who has it worse, the ones that fail or the ones that succeed. I think maybe a lot of people just need inspiration and once they’ve got that, they do the right thing anyway even if the ideology they’re following isn’t that. They’re just doing the right thing anyway. Like Newton thought he was doing induction, and he never did any induction but he was inspired by that idea and therefore interpreted his own behavior as being that when it wasn’t anything like that. So I think people often get it right. I mean there are a lot of happy people in the world, which there wouldn’t be if they were really following the theories that they say… they think they’re following.

Brett Hall: 35:40 So is spontaneity sort of a part of your life as that always being there, like instead of having this rigid plan we’re sticking to, something arises and it seems like fun, we’re just going to do that regardless of what kind of everywhere else is…

David Deutsch: 35:52 And I think that’s the thing… For one of my other examples is a failure, namely Vincent van Gogh. Which I understand is very… Vincent van Gogh. He, you know, never sold a painting, refused to take the job that his brother offered him in the art gallery which he would have been great at, but he wanted to paint his paintings and he wanted to paint them how he wanted to paint. And he must have been a very difficult person to engage with. But that’s what he wanted, and that’s what he did, and then eventually he was killed. I don’t know how probable that was. And then he was recognized after his death as a great genius. Well, how does that fit into the self-help thing? You know, did he help himself or not if he died trying?

Naval Ravikant: 36:40 Reminds me of that—I now don’t recall his name—the Russian mathematician. I think he’s still alive.

David Deutsch: 36:46 Oh yeah, yeah, he refused all the awards including multi—I don’t know if it was million dollars, hundreds of thousands.

Naval Ravikant: 36:50 Yeah, no, I think it was a million dollars.

David Deutsch: 36:52 Yeah, I think it was a million dollars.

Brett Hall: 36:53 This is—this is completely different from accepting a million dollars to work on something.

David Deutsch: 36:59 That would not have been good.

Brett Hall: 37:00 But if he works on it for its own sake and then somebody offers him a million dollars, win-win.

Naval Ravikant: 37:05 Why not take the million dollars?

Brett Hall: 37:07 Yeah, at least take it and then give it to someone that you like.

Naval Ravikant: 37:09 Yeah, for example. Now then there must be something strange going on, you know, there’s that little thing that they don’t tell us. So talking about these kinds of motivations and having fun, you’ve also applied that plus the universal explainer principle to taking children seriously. Treating them as adults, giving them the full freedom—

David Deutsch: 37:28 Well, treating children as people.

Naval Ravikant: 37:30 As people, yes. And no coercion, not even testing, not pushing, but rather let them follow their own natural curiosity and motivation. Is there a similar philosophy to taking adults seriously? Because it’s not even clear we take other adults fully seriously and so our relationships suffer.

David Deutsch: 37:45 I agree. Well, on the large scale we don’t yet know how to do it. I mean, the institutions of the West—science, economics, politics—are the best that have ever existed and they’re, you know, compared with history, they’re remarkably good at fostering creativity, not telling people what to do but letting people do what they want to do voluntarily and interact accordingly. They’re obviously very imperfect. All of them—the science, economics, and politics—have gaping imperfections which have yet to be solved. And I believe that, or I think, that any coercion, even as exerted by a state in enforcing the rule of law, is a sign of something imperfect. I mean, we can improve on that, but I don’t know how, but the improvements will have to be creatively produced by people who want to do that. As for, you know, I think with one’s friends, let’s say with the people one knows, one is automatically doing the taking them seriously thing. I mean, you wouldn’t say to a person—you might say to them, “watch out, it might rain today,” but if they say, “nah, I don’t like my raincoat, I’ll just wear this jacket”—

David Deutsch: 39:00 You lose? No. Wear the raincoat. Wear the raincoat or we’re not going there. You’d be considered both very rude and perverse, like not rational, for interacting with adults that way.

Naval Ravikant: 39:15 Except in the context of a defined relationship. So if there’s a teacher-student, if there’s a boss-employee, if there’s a husband-wife, then they have claims on each other’s behavior.

David Deutsch: 39:24 Well, I think that those institutions, if they have that property, which often they don’t, but if they have that property, they’re imperfect. There’s got to be a better way. I don’t think that an employer should speak to an employee in this punitive way, in this prescriptive way. The employer should be saying, well, first of all, it should be understood between the employer and employee what he was hired to do. And so, you know, they’re both on the same page in that regard. So you’re hired to do so-and-so. Then the employer can say, “Well, how about so-and-so?” And then the employee can say, “Ah, well, sounds good, but I’m sure that wouldn’t work.” And the employer could say, “I have an idea that it might, yeah, just try it.” And this kind of friendly interaction is optimal. As soon as an element of compulsion, coercion—

Brett Hall: 40:17 How does this inform, like, your human relationships with the other people in your life? Where, let’s say, for example, you’re with a spouse or you’re with a coworker, and they want to keep the relationship intact, so there’s certain constraints around it. So you can’t be fully free. There’s still constraints in operation. Or do you just not have those kinds of relationships in your life? Do you not put yourself in situations in life where you can’t operate with full fun and full freedom?

David Deutsch: 40:51 So everyone has a problem situation that is primarily what they’re trying to solve. To me, relationships are for addressing one’s own problem situation. It so happens, the way the world works, because of epistemology and so on, it means that very often two people addressing each other’s problems are far more than twice as efficient as each of them separately. So there’s an enhancement factor. And the economy at large has an enhancement factor of probably trillions or something. There are things which can be obtained via the economy, like an iPhone. The enhancement in cost is enormous. If you want to go and see a movie with somebody, it may well be that it’s more than twice as enjoyable if you go with a friend, but it’s not going to be trillions of times more enjoyable, but it’s still worth doing. And there are things like having children and so on which you can only do if you have a long-term relationship with a person with whom you have a common set of institutions.

Naval Ravikant: 42:00 …for solving problems, institutions of consent and institutions of… yeah.

David Deutsch: 42:07 So, I think that isn’t the point, actually. The point is that when you are involved in a problem-solving relationship of any kind, and it works, and it’s a good one, and it works, then it’s perverse to call yourself constrained by that. It’s rather like saying that in the economy, you’re constrained by having to pay for things. No, you’re not. Having to pay for things is the condition of consent. Like if it weren’t for consent, you wouldn’t get the things without paying, you’d have to at least rob somebody or whatever. But more to the point, it wouldn’t be there in the first place. Things are only there because of this massive set of institutions of consent, which if you… I was going to say, if you play along with them, but that’s not even the word… if you identify with them, if you identify with these institutions and want to be the kind of person that can fit into them, then you get an iPhone. It’s the same with any kind of relationship. But when you’re not getting something out of them, like maybe this Russian guy with his refusing the prize, there’s nothing you want from the economy, you just want to stay in your log cabin and work on maths, and that’s all you want. And any kind of human relationship or any kind of interaction with people is just an annoyance. Well then that’s what you do. That’s what you’d have to do. And if you then were somehow forced into the normal relationship, you’d be unhappy and you probably… well, I don’t know, I don’t want to say probably, but conditions for you producing good maths and for producing happiness for yourself are impaired by this thing which other people call freedom. So, you know, I gave a very long answer, but basically, one isn’t impaired by good relationships, one is enhanced by them.

Naval Ravikant: 43:59 Well, that ties into what are sometimes called clash of civilizations, although I think that is a misnomer right now. It’s the clash of civilization with the uncivilized. And there’s a prominent one going on right now, obviously, although when people listen to this they might not know what we’re referring to. But it seems to me that the existence of iPhones, for example, arises out of the civilization with the tradition of criticism. That’s the necessary precondition for making the kind of rapid progress that we have. But we’ve got enemies of that at the moment.

Brett Hall: 44:37 What do you think are the major threats that we’re facing at the moment, and are they existential? Because a lot of people are worried about existential threats in terms of the robots are going to take over the world or the next virus is going to wipe us out. But in terms of the so-called clash of civilization, what’s the major tension or threat that we’re facing as inheritors of…

Naval Ravikant: 45:00 The enlightenment. And what’s the remedy?

David Deutsch: 45:02 Yeah. Well, as you know, I can’t prophesy. No one can. I just try to avoid it. I can’t take seriously any threats to our civilization from the outside. That is, dictators, terrorists, and also AI’s if, or AGI’s or ASI’s if they appear. Presumably the AGI’s that appear, it’s to be hoped that the first ones will in fact be part of our culture, be part of enlightenment, and they will only enhance it. But if there is an existential—and I can’t take seriously the existential threats from things like the weather either because they’re on a much longer time scale and all the scare stories are really about that it might prove to be more expensive than we think. Or it could be that it would be better to start today on major projects. That can’t possibly be an existential threat. The only threat that could possibly be existential is if our civilization, the civilization of the enlightenment, makes bad enough mistakes. For example, fads and ideologies of denying and hating that very civilization. Well, there have always been such fads and I’ve, following Roy Porter, I’ve talked about the fact that the enlightenment in itself had a rebellious anti-enlightenment built in from day one. And that anti-enlightenment has got descendants today and things like woke and so on, whatever you call them, are among the descendants of it. In principle, a thing like that could bring down civilization. I see no sign of it, I must say. I mean, I’m trying to avoid prophecy here, but although I think those things are acting in the direction of bringing down civilization, I don’t see any actual sign that they are actually making progress in that.

Brett Hall: 47:05 Are we nonetheless in the West, whether it’s London, New York, Sydney, a little weaker than what we would have been during the second world war where, and again of course I’m no historian, but there seemed to at least be a stronger impulse of the average person to understand the bright line between who was on the right side and who wasn’t? But now we’re seeing people in the West standing up for not the victims but the perpetrators. Do you see this as a new phenomena?

David Deutsch: 47:39 Yeah, if you want to draw an analogy with the mid 20th century, the place where we’re most analogous to is not the second world war, it’s the thirties. Twenties and thirties, the interwar period. There, there was also a massive loss of confidence in the rightness of our culture. There was the Great Depression. It was commonplace, it was conventional wisdom to draw completely the wrong lesson from the Great Depression. People thought that we needed less capitalism, less freedom in general. We needed more strong leaders. Once it came to the war, people saw that push had come to shove and there was very little in the West that opposed doing the right thing. My favorite example of this is the Oxford Union Society, which had a debate with the undergraduates with… where the motion was “This house would not fight for king and country under any circumstances.” I didn’t know it was “under any circumstances,” I looked it up recently, and it won. That motion won. Allegedly, this gave Hitler ideas. In any case, the ideology of the Nazis and so on, of the fascists in general, was that liberal democracy was decadent and decaying, and Britain and France and America lost no opportunity to confirm this, to make it look as though it was decaying. It wasn’t doing anything of the kind, it was just kind of… it was more like, you piss on us, we say it’s raining. That was more the attitude and within that, there were people who adopted all sorts of justifications for that, like the pacifism and so on. But a year after that motion, after the elite students in Oxford University had joined up in the armed forces, you know, they were fighting the Battle of Britain. They were the pilots fighting the Battle of Britain. They were the officers who were leading their men to fight and to know that our side was right and was going to win despite awful setbacks at the beginning of the war.

David Deutsch: 49:49 I once asked my mother, who is a Holocaust survivor and was having a very bad time at the time, I once asked her, when did you become sure that the allies were going to win? Because it seemed to me that, you know, in September ‘39, I thought the whole world thought that Britain was doomed, and Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador, father of John Kennedy, cabled back saying “Britain is finished, make your accommodation with the Nazis” and so on. And then the British got to hear of this and asked him to be withdrawn as ambassador. But anyway, that was the common thing I thought. But my mother said when I asked her when did you become sure the allies would win, she said September the 3rd, 1939, the day that Britain and France declared war, because that was the moment when they reversed their policy of saying it’s raining and started the policy of actually standing up for civilization. The tactical details of how that was going to happen nobody could have foreseen. Nobody could have foreseen exactly how we’re going to win, but that we would win and had to win was to some people obvious and the British as a nation just flipped on a dime. They just believed one batch of things, one batch of ideologies and then apparently, you know, it seemed like a day later they believed the opposite. There’s a nice scene in the latest Churchill movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s where Churchill is very depressed and his colleagues in the Conservative Party are trying to push him to come to a deal with Hitler and he has already seen since the early thirties that this is impossible, but nobody, very few would listen to him. And then he goes and meets some ordinary people and I won’t spoil it for you, but that’s not a thing that happened in real life, although it could have happened.

Brett Hall: 51:53 So, he’s getting the common sense, clear vision from the so-called normal people?

David Deutsch: 52:00 From the ordinary people, yes.

Brett Hall: 52:02 But, you know, the Oxford Union, the elites are taking the wrong side.

David Deutsch: 52:06 Well, they had been. I think by that time they had flipped as well.

Naval Ravikant: 52:08 So today, it seems like the festering of anti-enlightenment goes on apace at elite colleges and universities around the place. Is this just a necessary byproduct of, well, this is where the creative bright people are and so they’re going to be rebellious and so you’re necessarily going to get people standing up against the mainstream? Does it have to be this way?

David Deutsch: 52:31 I think historically it was a mixture of things. The fact that there were rebels among the students, that’s a good thing and it will always be true. In Germany, the students were, that was the hotbed of Nazism. So the core of Nazism was in German universities. That wasn’t true in Britain. In Britain, the anti-democratic tendency were leftists. They were communists. They were, as you know, at the beginning of the war they were all pretending to be pacifists. So they were against the war, but that was because Stalin told them to be against the war because he’d signed the deal with Hitler. They turned on a sixpence when Stalin told them to. But that’s a different phenomenon. So students were upper-class people at the time. They were leftists. Some of them were fascist sympathizers. Most of them flipped immediately. I don’t know why, you know, it’s one of these like a phase change. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, nobody paid any attention, you know, they wanted appeasement. Before that he’d invaded Austria, before that invaded the Rhineland and so on. Everybody just wanted appeasement. Suddenly he invades Poland and everybody’s like, “this is unacceptable,” you know, they everybody suddenly realized what was happening. I don’t know why, there was no difference between the cases, but that’s how it worked. Maybe it’s that some people had been thinking and others… People had been relying on those people and they’d been thinking wrong and they changed their minds because they had been thinking and the people who relied on them then also changed their minds. You know, maybe it happened like that as a sort of seeding process.

Naval Ravikant: 54:15 Information cascade. Yeah, it seems that people have a tendency to play around with ideology until things become serious and then the consequence of the ideology become obvious. And then the right-thinking people at the top change their minds and then most people just follow them as a…

David Deutsch: 54:31 It could be. I’d very much like that to be true in the current crisis with the pogrom that’s just happened. But I don’t know whether it will. I mean there, again, there have been cases before where I would have said right, now’s the time. But it wasn’t. And I don’t know whether it’ll turn out different this time. But I mean you asked me earlier the question, is civilization in danger? I don’t think so.