The Deutsch Files IV

Summary

In the fourth and longest of the Deutsch Files, Naval Ravikant, Brett Hall, and David Deutsch try to weave the four strands of The Fabric of Reality — physics, computation, evolution, epistemology — into a single picture of reality. Deutsch argues that “fundamental” should be redefined: a theory is fundamental if it appears in many good explanations, not because it is microscopic. Emergent phenomena like thermodynamics, life, and knowledge are equally fundamental. He explains why the dominant initial-conditions-plus-laws-of-motion paradigm is broken (it can’t accommodate computation, information, the second law, or final conditions), and presents Constructor Theory as a research program built on which transformations are possible vs. impossible. Already it has produced an information-theoretic first law of thermodynamics (Marletto), a constructor theory of probability, and a constructor theory of time built on Wheeler-DeWitt and Page-Wootters.

The middle of the conversation revisits the origin story of the universal quantum computer. Deutsch did not set out to invent quantum computing — he was designing an experiment to test Hugh Everett’s many-worlds theory by putting a coherent observer (“get inside the observer”) into a two-slit setup. The thought experiment required the observer to run on coherent quantum hardware. Only later, in conversation with Charlie Bennett (“the hardware is physics”), did he recast Turing’s analysis in quantum mechanics and discover algorithms with no classical analogue. Naval and Deutsch tie this back to error correction across the multiverse, knowledge as a “crystal” stretched across branches, and convergent evolution of ideas within a single universe.

The final two-thirds turn to anti-rational memes, civilization, and education. Deutsch argues anti-rational memes are exactly what we should expect — the analogue of evolution’s drive toward fidelity in DNA — and that today’s educational institutions are themselves the most anti-rational memes in the West, now compounded by being captured by hostile ideology. He defends Taking Children Seriously through the iPhone counter-example (no curriculum, no coercion, near-universal adoption), Steven Spielberg matinees (“90% of children, no roll call, no test”), and Frederick Douglass’s slave-children risking the whip to learn to read after a day in the fields. He pushes back hard on slippery-slope pessimism: the Enlightenment was created by people thoroughly constrained by anti-rational memes, the Medici (“Elon Musk today”) simply violated some of them, and woke is a fad without a worldview (“the negation of an explanation is not an explanation”). He closes with a personal note as a second-generation immigrant, and argues that Britain’s error-correction layers — even the much-maligned blob — will probably absorb the current legislation. Mass immigration is the right policy, provided immigrants love the country and want to do well in it.

Highlights

”Fundamental ideas are the ones needed in more types of explanations”

“Fundamental ideas are the ones that are needed in more types of explanations. We’ll never get to the ultimate fundamental theory, because that would mean that there were no more problems, and that can’t happen.” — David Deutsch, 4:51

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”Knowledge is a crystal in the multiverse”

“If knowledge is a kind of information which once it’s there keeps itself in existence and gets that property by error correction, then since there are many errors for every possible truth, in the multiverse, if there’s error correction, then there’re a bunch of unlike universes which become alike in the region in which they’re correcting errors.” — David Deutsch, 6:42

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”Quantum computers came from trying to test Many Worlds”

“I first thought of the experiment to test Everett and then much later thought about quantum computers. People think I thought of them in the opposite order, but I didn’t.” — David Deutsch, 26:03

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”Anti-rational memes get more anti-rational — there’s nothing to stop them”

“The thing we should expect when we first encounter anti-rational memes is that they were going to get more and more anti-rational. There’s nothing to stop them. The fact that they’re going to eventually kill the subculture that has them doesn’t stop them, any more than the peacock’s tail sooner or later will result in the extinction of the peacock species.” — David Deutsch, 31:56

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”The slippery slope is wrong — the Enlightenment happened anyway”

“If it were a real thing, then we wouldn’t have ever had any progress, because in the past the anti-rational memes were worse, much worse, and yet the Enlightenment happened. The Enlightenment was created by people thoroughly constrained by anti-rational memes — everything they said had to be praising God or praising the king. A small number of people, the elites among the elites, the Medici, were so powerful that they could violate some of the restrictions, and it grew from there.” — David Deutsch, 46:46

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”Frederick Douglass and the boys who risked a whipping to learn to read”

“These teenage boys who’d been working in the fields to the maximum extent that you can be forced to work in a field, then they came home and they slunk off to this lady’s house where she would be teaching them to read. If she had been caught she would have gone to prison, and they would have been whipped.” — David Deutsch, 1:04:47

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”We owe something to the surrounding culture”

“I’m a second-generation immigrant and I’m not violent. My parents took for granted that they were going to have to work, learn English well, get a job, go to university. The idea that they were owed something by the surrounding culture is quite the opposite. We owe something to the surrounding culture.” — David Deutsch, 1:18:57

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Key Points

• Reductionism vs holism is a false dichotomy (1:01) - “I want to put them both in a sack and tie it up and let them come out with a resolution”
• Thermodynamics is emergent physics, but it’s epistemology too (4:05) - The terminology of “fundamental” is misleading
• Middle World is wrong (5:41) - “We understand quasars and subatomic particles. If that argument were valid we would have stopped a long time ago”
• Constructor theory is more reductionist than QM but compatible with emergence (8:00) - Hopes to consume biology, economics, eventually consciousness (with one extra idea)
• Constructor theory like Feynman’s checkerboard (9:21) - Rules of possible/impossible moves, not fancy dynamical math
• Constructor-theoretic first law about information (13:13) - Chiara Marletto’s nugget; existing thermodynamics only puts information into the second law
• Lower bound on energy comes for free (13:55) - Otherwise: perpetual motion machine of the first kind
• Constructor theory of time (14:25) - Wheeler-DeWitt → Page-Wootters → Sam → Deutsch & Marletto
• Constructor theory is necessarily deterministic (17:11) - “More probable = more magic” — stochastic theories don’t make sense
• Suspicious of theories announced by their conclusions (21:22) - Popper: “What is your problem?” — the right framing
• Quantum computer was originally a coherent observer (23:32) - To test many-worlds vs collapse
• Roger Penrose: “yeah, but quantum theory isn’t true” (25:46) - A consistent position, but not the one most physicists take
• Charlie Bennett conversation (29:03) - “The hardware is physics” → recasting Turing in QM
• Convergent evolution in the multiverse is much stronger (30:00) - All variants happen and are error-corrected
• Anti-rational memes are evolutionarily stable (32:24) - DNA error-correction is the model; cultures need fidelity too
• Athens: a tiny burst of creativity (36:00) - Counter to Matt Ridley’s population-size argument; killed by force of numbers
• Our enlightenment has lasted longer than any previous one (36:30) - 300-500 years; previous ones lasted a generation or two
• The most anti-rational memes in the West are educational (37:32) - Other cultures still dominated by their own anti-rational memes
• Ribosomes are the educational institutions of cells (39:00) - Stopped evolving 2 billion years ago
• Educational institutions are themselves the most anti-rational memes (41:55) - And now propagate other anti-rational memes
• Freedom of speech isn’t really impaired (45:00) - Fads/shibboleths ≠ medieval guild restrictions
• Pronouns in your bio = the beginning of the end (46:33) - The line that hasn’t yet been crossed
• Slippery slope is wrong (46:46) - “If it were real we wouldn’t have ever had any progress”
• Attlee’s communists were violently pro-British (49:59) - Persuaded Americans to join NATO; “systems good at error correction make larger errors”
• Walking and native language aren’t taught (55:14) - “If children were taught to walk in school, half of them at age 10 wouldn’t have learned”
• Steven Spielberg vs the school paradigm (1:01:29) - 90% attendance with no roll call, no test, just willing engagement
• The iPhone counter-example (1:02:30) - No curriculum, near-universal demand from children
• Frederick Douglass and the slave children (1:04:22) - Risking a whipping to learn to read after a day in the fields
• Modern Oxford keeps the wrong things (1:10:31) - Enacting rituals preserved, useful subjects taken over (cf. Dawkins in NZ)
• Restoring 1950s curricula is feasible (1:12:34) - Government can change the national curriculum; woke is a fad, not a worldview
• Negation of an explanation is not an explanation (1:14:27) - Why woke is shallower than 1930s communists
• Albanians as a counter to “Muslims = anti-Israel” (1:16:31) - Saved their Jews against the Grand Mufti’s recruitment
• Radicalization is the West’s fault, not Islam’s (1:18:08) - Multiculturalism, pandering, education that trashes Britain
• The blob protects against bad legislation (1:23:14) - Civil Service prevents implementation as another error-correction layer
• Mass immigration is the way to go (1:24:15) - Provided immigrants love the country and want to do well

Mentions

People

• Isaac Newton (1:01) - “Bottom-up” reductionist physics traces to him
• Richard Dawkins (5:41) - “Middle World”; later, almost canceled in NZ over “traditional modes of physics”
• Richard Feynman (9:00) - Checkerboard analogy for ultimate laws
• Chiara Marletto (12:22) - Co-developer of constructor theory: first law / probability / time
• John Wheeler & Bryce DeWitt (14:25) - Quantum gravity with no time
• Julian Barbour (15:00) - Wrote a book on “no time” view
• Don Page & William Wootters (15:00) - General Page-Wootters time construction
• Sam (current student/colleague) (15:43) - Most advanced theory of time so far built on Page-Wootters
• Hugh Everett (23:32) - Many-worlds; quantum computing originally an experiment to test his theory
• Roger Penrose (25:46) - “Yeah, but quantum theory isn’t true”
• Charles Bennett (29:03) - “If hardware is physics, you’re using the wrong physics”
• Karl Popper (34:59) - “No instruction from without”; saved the theory of creativity
• Matt Ridley (36:00) - Naval invokes; population-size theory of progress (Deutsch disagrees)
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali (40:46) - “The perfect person to write a book on the Enlightenment”
• The Medici (47:01) - Powerful enough to violate the restrictions of their day
• Elon Musk (47:27) - Today’s analogue
• Charles Darwin (48:42) - Devastated by the death of his daughter, never went to church again, no backlash
• Clement Attlee (49:31) - Functionally-communist post-war PM, persuaded US to join NATO
• Steven Spielberg (1:01:29) - 90% attendance counter-example for “you have to coerce children”
• Frederick Douglass (1:04:22) - The slave-children-learning-to-read story
• Douglas Murray (1:07:13) - “The West running out of steam”; legal speech
• Richard Dawkins (in NZ) (1:10:58) - Almost canceled for “there is only one mode of understanding physics”
• Bruce Pascoe / Dark Emu (1:11:45) - Australian indigenous-history revisionism in school curriculum
• Osama bin Laden (1:12:08) - Letter to America going viral on TikTok as a misinformation example
• The Grand Mufti / Albanians (1:16:31) - Counter to “all Muslims anti-Jewish” narrative
• Boris Johnson (1:21:39) - Won the red wall once; lost it
• David Starkey (1:21:25) - On the red wall never voting Labour again

Concepts & Theories

• The four strands of reality (0:00) - Physics, computation, evolution, epistemology
• Constructor Theory (7:25) - Possible vs impossible transformations as the framework
• Crystal of knowledge in the multiverse (6:42) - Knowledge as error-corrected information across branches
• Constructor theory of time (14:25) - In progress
• Constructor theory of probability (16:00) - Marletto’s deterministic-but-probabilistic theory
• Universal constructor (17:11) - Deutsch’s current work
• Wigner’s friend (24:00) - Already showed many-worlds and collapse aren’t equivalent
• Anti-rational memes (31:10) - Naval admits this is the part he resonated with least
• Convergent evolution / convergent ideas (30:00) - Within and across the multiverse
• The West vs the rest (37:32) - Other cultures still dominated by anti-rational memes
• Bucket theory of the mind (54:00) - The wrong philosophy underpinning prevailing education
• Taking Children Seriously (55:00) - No-coercion approach; iPhone, Spielberg, Douglass examples
• From the river to the sea (1:15:43) - Slogan recited without knowing which river or sea
• Negation of an explanation isn’t an explanation (1:14:27) - Why woke is shallower than 1930s communism

Products & Tech

• Quantum computer / qubits (23:32) - Origin story
• mRNA vaccines (21:22) - As an example of “fame happens to people working on real problems”
• AI regulation (44:00) - Naval: “now we’re talking about limiting the free exercise of mathematics”
• iPhone (1:02:30) - Counter-example to coercion theory of education
• Kepler planets (31:06) - Naval probing Deutsch on extraterrestrial life

Surprising Quotes

“I’m always suspicious when someone says what they’re going to invent or what they’re going to prove or what they’re going to find. I would rather they said this is a problem I’m going to address. I don’t know where it’s going.” — David Deutsch, 21:22

“I first thought of the experiment to test Everett and then much later thought about quantum computers.” — David Deutsch, 26:03

“It’s a bit of a miracle that anti-rational memes don’t necessarily get worse and worse. The actual faculty of creativity couldn’t have evolved in order to be creative. It must have evolved for some other reason.” — David Deutsch, 34:59

“Educational institutions, if you think of them as ideas in people’s minds, are themselves the most anti-rational memes in the West.” — David Deutsch, 41:55

“It wasn’t Islam, it was the fault of the West. Not for treating them too harshly, in a way for treating them too leniently — they should have been integrated and it should have been understood that the same law applies to them as to everyone else.” — David Deutsch, 1:18:43

Transcript

Naval Ravikant: 0:00 I want to be pedantically exhaustive about connecting the four theories of the fabric of reality. I think most people view what you’ve written as four separate things, but in your mind they connect together into one thing. Knowledge is a crystal and nature has no boundaries. We’ve talked how epistemology and evolution connect — both forms of knowledge creation. Quantum physics and computation connect to create quantum computation. How does physics connect to evolution? How does evolution connect to computation?

David Deutsch: 1:01 Evolution and epistemology — people find the connection between both of those and physics very counterintuitive because most people think of physics in a very bottom-up way. Ever since Newton, physicists have tried to shoehorn other physical theories into that mold, giving rise to the foundations problem of thermodynamics. How can you have an exact second law when the fundamental theories are time-reversible? The prevailing view is that thermodynamics and epistemology are emergent and therefore not fundamental. I think a theory which goes deeper than the current paradigm has to put emergent phenomena and microscopic theories on the same level. People talk about reductionism and holism — I want to put them both in a sack and tie it up.

Naval Ravikant: 3:18 Reductionist theories aren’t the only theories there are because they don’t form good explanations at the level where you need them. At every level of emergence there is a possibility for an explanation, and you need that explanation.

David Deutsch: 3:46 Exactly.

Naval Ravikant: 3:47 If you’re trying to figure out how a steam engine works, you’re not going to do statistical mechanics and trace every collision. You’re going to start at thermodynamics.

Naval Ravikant: 4:26 Anyone listening hears “fundamental” and thinks reductionism. But you would say people are a fundamental feature of reality. So what does fundamental mean in this worldview?

David Deutsch: 4:51 Fundamental ideas are the ones that are needed in more types of explanations. We’ll never get to the ultimate fundamental theory because that would mean there were no more problems, and that can’t happen.

David Deutsch: 5:22 A rule for deciding that something is real. There are things we don’t understand about real — in what sense are numbers real? In what sense are laws of physics real? We can’t trip over one, but we can’t understand anything in physics without them.

Brett Hall: 5:41 Some claim we are cognitively incapable of understanding physics — Dawkins’s “Middle World.”

David Deutsch: 6:19 Among other things, we understand quasars and subatomic particles. If that argument were valid, then we would have stopped a long time ago in understanding things.

Naval Ravikant: 6:32 Can you draw the connection between quantum physics and epistemology?

David Deutsch: 6:42 The nicest one: knowledge is information which once it’s there keeps itself in existence by error correction. Since there are many errors for every truth, in the multiverse, if there’s error correction, then there are unlike universes which become alike in the region they’re correcting errors. That’s a striking connection between epistemology and physics. Constructor theory emerged from quantum theory but it’s a lower level of description — more reductionist than QM, yet more compatible with emergent properties. Eventually we hope it consumes knowledge, economics, ultimately consciousness — though my view is consciousness will require an extra idea.

Brett Hall: 8:31 Constructor theory has echoes of Feynman’s checkerboard.

David Deutsch: 9:21 Yeah, it could be just like that. If you have a listing of all the moves in a chess game you can’t understand it without the rules. But knowing the rules isn’t enough either — to understand games as opposed to just win them, you need a lot more.

Naval Ravikant: 10:15 Can I back up on constructor theory? What problem are you trying to solve?

David Deutsch: 10:40 When I wrote my first paper on constructor theory it was philosophical. We didn’t know — and still don’t — what the definitive axioms are. We don’t have a good theory of initial conditions. Why should we need initial conditions when we are perfectly fine to have no theory of final conditions? Computation and information can’t be expressed in initial-conditions-plus-laws-of-motion form. I ended up with 18 motivations.

David Deutsch: 12:22 I gave a talk at the Clarendon Laboratory and Chiara was in the audience as a graduate student. She came up afterwards and said “what about so?” because I had contradicted myself. Since then she’s worked on constructor theory of life, of probability. My favorite nugget: in constructor theoretic thermodynamics, the first law is to do with information, not just the second.

David Deutsch: 13:55 You incidentally get a lower bound on energy. If there were no lower bound, you’d have a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. Existing thermodynamics has to impose that as an extra condition; constructor theory doesn’t.

David Deutsch: 14:25 The first people to have the idea of time-from-entanglement were Wheeler and DeWitt — quantum gravity in which there’s no time. Time is an emergent property of how three-dimensional spaces are entangled. Nothing ever changes. Page and Wootters generalized it to any quantum theory. When I saw it I immediately thought, “Yeah, this is what time is.” Then Sam came along and got something more out of it. Now Chiara and I are working on a constructor theory of time which lays down rules that any theory obeying them will have time. Constructor theory is necessarily deterministic.

Naval Ravikant: 17:07 Your view of the quantum multiverse is already deterministic.

David Deutsch: 17:11 Yes. Saying something’s more probable is like saying it has more magic. Now I’m working on a universal constructor.

Brett Hall: 17:47 Is universal constructor related to virtual reality generators in Fabric of Reality?

David Deutsch: 18:00 Only generally, in that the existence of virtual reality is Turing universality. In constructor theory you hardly have to say that — it’s so built in.

Naval Ravikant: 18:41 When do we start getting predictions and tests?

David Deutsch: 18:54 The lower bound on energy is a prediction. Not strong because everyone believed it. Where constructor theory will start making new things is in combinations of existing theories — though I don’t believe in the quantum theory of life; that’s a blind alley. In Fabric of Reality I hinted that the multiverse solves free will, and I don’t think it does at all. But it gives a framework — counterfactuals have more meaning in the multiverse than in classical theory, and even more in constructor theory. I can’t foretell the growth of knowledge. Constructor theory could end up as a curiosity, or it could be the opposite.

Brett Hall: 20:37 As a good Popperian you say constructor theory could be wrong. Other people promoting new theories speak with great confidence and get more attention. Is that an inherent disadvantage of being a Popperian?

David Deutsch: 21:22 If you were fanatical about approval and funding you’d maximize that. But people working on deep things for their own sake tend to make progress. I’m always suspicious when someone says what they’re going to invent or prove or find. I’d rather they said “this is a problem I’m going to address. I don’t know where it’s going.” Popper used to say, “What is your problem?”

Naval Ravikant: 22:46 You’ve created the quantum theory of computation. Did you start with Hugh Everett’s many-worlds?

David Deutsch: 23:32 When I first came up with the idea of quantum computer I didn’t even think of it as a quantum computer. The consensus was that many-worlds gave the same predictions as collapse — already known false because of Wigner’s friend, but people just shrugged. So I thought Everett’s theory must be testable. Simplest test: a version of the two-slit experiment with a measurement of that measurement, done with a computer. The computer can’t be decoherent — must be augmented with quantum operations. That’s what it was in my mind: an object connected to a computer. The paper was rejected — “that’s philosophy” — so I put it aside. I told Roger Penrose, “you’ve got to accept that if quantum theory is universally true, then Everett is right.” He said, “Yeah, but quantum theory isn’t true.” A consistent position, but not the one most physicists take. I first thought of the experiment to test Everett and then much later thought about quantum computers.

Naval Ravikant: 26:30 Is this the same experiment in Beginning of Infinity as going inside the mind of the AI?

David Deutsch: 26:51 Yes.

Naval Ravikant: 27:09 If we get inside the observer, it’s the double-slit experiment all over again — unless there’s a different kind of computer, it’ll be vulnerable to interference. We need qubits.

David Deutsch: 27:23 The term qubit wasn’t invented until much later. To do this test we’ll need AGI as well — that’s not my fault. The opposition wants the conscious observer to do something different. The AGI has to be running on a quantum computer.

David Deutsch: 29:03 I had this conversation with Charlie Bennett where he said “the hardware is physics.” I said, “if the hardware is physics, you’re using the wrong physics.” So I went home and recast Turing’s analysis in quantum physics instead of paper tape. And then I saw there were algorithms that didn’t have classical analogues.

Naval Ravikant: 29:37 Is error correction also going on within a single universe?

David Deutsch: 30:00 Convergent evolution — tigers evolved twice. People can have an idea and someone they’ve never heard of has the same idea. But it’s not as systematic as the multiverse, where all variants happen and are error-corrected.

Brett Hall: 30:42 Does that argue for more life out there?

David Deutsch: 30:53 Maybe, but we don’t know. We could be a fluke.

Naval Ravikant: 31:10 Let’s talk about anti-rational memes. I’ll admit I didn’t resonate with that chapter as well.

David Deutsch: 31:56 That this happened seems unanswerable. There’s no other way to explain why it took 300,000 years to get from stone tools to real progress. Anti-rational memes shouldn’t surprise us — biology’s most stable construct is the genetic code. The thing we should expect is that anti-rational memes get more and more anti-rational. There’s nothing to stop them. The fact that they’ll eventually kill the subculture doesn’t stop them, like the peacock’s tail.

David Deutsch: 34:59 The actual faculty of creativity couldn’t have evolved in order to be creative. It must have evolved for some other reason. Popper saves us — there’s no instruction from without. There’s no way to copy an existing culture into the next generation. The next generation has to guess.

Naval Ravikant: 36:00 Matt Ridley says you need a population size before progress. Athens was tiny by the world’s standards.

David Deutsch: 36:30 And yet had a huge burst of creativity. If it had gone on for 300 years like ours has, they might well have reached what we have. But it was destroyed. Our enlightenment, depending how you count, has lasted 300-500 years — far longer than any previous one. Previous ones lasted a generation or two, then ended because they couldn’t solve the problem that arose, or were killed by the bad guys winning by force of numbers.

Naval Ravikant: 37:32 What are the dominant anti-rational memes today that could take us back to a dark age?

David Deutsch: 37:44 I can’t think of a plausible way to go back to dark ages. We’ve got to distinguish the West from the rest. All other cultures are still dominated by anti-rational memes that embody their culture. In the West, the most anti-rational subculture is the one to do with education.

Naval Ravikant: 38:53 Why education?

David Deutsch: 38:55 Maybe we should expect that. In DNA, the most stable construct is the code for ribosomes — they’re the educational institutions of cells. Their job is to pass on knowledge as faithfully as evolution can make it. Biologists think the ribosome stopped evolving two billion years ago. In a culture, traditionally, the thing maintaining culture across generations is educational institutions. From that point of view, they have to be anti-rational.

Brett Hall: 41:20 Most species and most civilizations have gone extinct because evolution didn’t happen fast enough.

David Deutsch: 41:55 Primarily it’s the educational institutions themselves. As ideas in people’s minds, they’re the most anti-rational memes in the West. They also propagate other anti-rational memes.

David Deutsch: 45:00 Certain things you’re not allowed to say, certain things you must say — but those are fads, shibboleths. In medieval times there were guilds; we don’t have that. Anyone who says things in public has to obey certain constraints, but the language is still universal. If you had to say “Comrade Stalin” at the beginning of every newspaper — even that didn’t completely stop Soviet mathematicians. We’re nowhere near a woke declaration at the beginning of every paper.

Brett Hall: 46:29 Do you have pronouns in your bio?

David Deutsch: 46:33 That’s the thing that isn’t happening yet. That would be the beginning of the end.

Naval Ravikant: 46:39 The slippery slope is real — it’s the nature of politics.

David Deutsch: 46:46 If it were a real thing we wouldn’t have ever had any progress. The Enlightenment was created by people thoroughly constrained by anti-rational memes — everything they said had to praise God or the king. The Medici were powerful enough to violate the restrictions and it grew from there.

Naval Ravikant: 47:27 Elon Musk today.

David Deutsch: 47:28 Yeah, and you.

Brett Hall: 47:32 The “age of hyperbole” — perceived golden ages of capitalism and the space age now under attack. You think that’s overstated.

David Deutsch: 48:08 Hyperbolic. Something really bad is happening, but it’s not a reversion to old things. The mechanisms that get people canceled today aren’t the same as before. Darwin was utterly devastated by the death of his daughter and never went to church again. He didn’t get any personal backlash because a gentleman who was an academic could do what he thought right. There was no mechanism to force him.

David Deutsch: 49:59 Britain in 1945 voted in functionally communists. Attlee nationalized everything — and yet had no chance of sinking the project of Britain. It was Attlee who persuaded the Americans to join NATO. They were violently anti-Soviet, violently pro-British. Systems good at error correction make larger errors, and the major ones were corrected.

Naval Ravikant: 50:53 The problem is people who try to hack the system itself — giving complete power to one side for any number of years.

David Deutsch: 54:00 Existing educational practices, from the bucket-theory point of view, are the same as they’ve always been. The general culture has got less punitive. People got the idea that you’ve got to pour it in but be nice about it. The whole thing is measured by the exam — what percentage of the stuff that was poured in actually went in.

Naval Ravikant: 55:00 But as a parent, we’re terrified our kids might grow up not knowing the language, not knowing math.

David Deutsch: 55:14 Speaking one’s native language and walking aren’t taught in our culture and never have been. There’s a quote — if children were taught to walk in school, half of them at age 10 wouldn’t have learned. The vast majority of improvements in school and parenting were done by left-wing people, which is ironic — their wider theory was always harmful.

David Deutsch: 57:00 The leftists thought they were undermining society. Right-wingers said “if you don’t beat children into conformity how will they work in factories?” And the leftists said, “that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.” They were wrong about everything except their education theory.

Brett Hall: 58:08 Learning just is knowledge creation. Any mandated curriculum is handing the student answers to questions not asked.

Naval Ravikant: 58:58 But if the kid doesn’t know 7+5, they’ll have a hard time in our society.

David Deutsch: 59:08 Not true. They will have a problem when they encounter “how many shoes can fit in my wardrobe?” Once they have the problem and they’re free, they will solve it.

Naval Ravikant: 59:37 I grew up in India partially. The uneducated had no chance.

David Deutsch: 1:00:03 Society may be arranged so it only allows progress if you bear certain scars — a shibboleth. But I think of counter-examples. One can learn coping mechanisms.

Brett Hall: 1:01:05 So what does your school look like?

David Deutsch: 1:01:13 In my ideal world, everybody does something different. Steven Spielberg in his blockbuster era — 90% of children would go and sit quietly while the film played. No roll call, no test, but they spoke about the film and wanted variants. Some became film directors. That’s how far away the school paradigm is from what could and should be. Nearly all children want an iPhone. There’s no iPhone curriculum.

David Deutsch: 1:03:21 People then have to explain the iPhone counter-example or their philosophy falls apart. So they have to say A, it’s bad for them, and B, it’s caused by coercion — the coercion of dopamine addiction.

Brett Hall: 1:03:31 Wait, dopamine is involved in all pleasure.

David Deutsch: 1:03:41 Children have problems, they try to solve them, they’re powerless — that’s what parents and society are for. To allow them to solve easily-soluble problems so they can get on to deep ones.

David Deutsch: 1:04:22 In Frederick Douglass’s autobiography — slave children learning to read was illegal, not for the slaves but for the teachers. Teenage boys who’d been working in the fields would come home and slunk off to this lady’s house where she would teach them to read. If she had been caught she’d have gone to prison and they’d have been whipped. A terrible tragedy — these teenage boys risked a whipping to learn after a day in the fields, and today their descendants are thought to have low IQ or be perverse and have to be forced into school. I think their ancestors were how humans are. Somebody ought to make a movie about this.

Brett Hall: 1:07:13 Devil’s advocate — Douglas Murray says the West is running out of steam. If we extract away schools, would this exhaust the West?

David Deutsch: 1:08:17 The schools and universities have been taken over by something hostile to our culture. Murray wants to go back to the older system. Horrible and disgusting though it was, it did transmit a culture. The older model couldn’t survive — the general culture has changed, its values are in conflict with the static values of education.

David Deutsch: 1:09:43 I don’t know what to do about freeing the schools and universities. There isn’t a cadre of genuinely liberal teachers to replace them. It’s not like the civil service.

Naval Ravikant: 1:10:14 Oxford — exactly the way it was 300 years ago, mixed with so much new “creativity.”

David Deutsch: 1:10:31 They’ve kept exactly the wrong things. Enacting rituals isn’t our culture. Useful subjects are being taken over.

Naval Ravikant: 1:10:58 Richard Dawkins almost got cancelled for telling New Zealand “there is only one mode of understanding physics.”

Brett Hall: 1:11:18 In Australia the syllabus is replete with indigenous modes of doing science.

David Deutsch: 1:11:24 It’s going to cause everything to deteriorate. Once our culture deteriorates enough the Chinese can walk in.

Naval Ravikant: 1:11:42 I look forward to the indigenous electric motor.

Brett Hall: 1:11:45 Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu — revisionist history claiming pre-European Australians had agriculture and were on their way to factories.

Naval Ravikant: 1:12:08 Osama bin Laden’s letter to America going around being praised by college students.

David Deutsch: 1:12:34 If we can’t restore 1950s schools, how about 1950s curricula? The government can change the national curriculum. Woke is a fad, not an evolved thing. It’s all shallow. Lefties of the 20s and 30s believed stuff — capitalist class stealing the fruits of labour. They had a theory. Woke is not a theory.

Naval Ravikant: 1:14:18 It’s a denial of a whole bunch of otherwise good pieces of knowledge.

David Deutsch: 1:14:27 The negation of an explanation is not an explanation. They don’t have a rival worldview.

Naval Ravikant: 1:15:00 They have a theory that there are people keeping them down — inflation is up because of price gouging.

David Deutsch: 1:15:18 Ask a woke demonstrator how inflation is caused by the greed of factory owners. They chant “from the river to the sea” and don’t know which river or sea.

Naval Ravikant: 1:15:51 These anti-rational memes don’t have to be correct — they can just drive species extinction.

David Deutsch: 1:16:03 I don’t think they’re poison. I think they are a burden.

Naval Ravikant: 1:16:08 Your homeland is facing this — Muslim voters in the West, traditional support for Israel disappearing.

David Deutsch: 1:16:31 Plenty of Muslims are pro-Israel. The Grand Mufti went around Europe recruiting Muslims to the Nazi cause; in Albania it failed. Albanians as a population thought it was their religious duty to thwart the deportation of the Jews and they succeeded. A counter-example.

Brett Hall: 1:18:00 Muslim immigrants whose children are radicalized — whose fault?

David Deutsch: 1:18:08 That’s the fault of Britain and multiculturalism, of an educational system that trashes Britain and glorifies the other. A hundred years ago there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the British Army. It wasn’t Islam, it was the West — not for treating them too harshly, but too leniently. They should have been integrated.

David Deutsch: 1:18:57 I’m a second-generation immigrant and I’m not violent. My parents took for granted they were going to have to work, learn English, get a job, go to university. The idea that they were owed something by the surrounding culture is quite the opposite. We owe something to the surrounding culture. That was their attitude.

Naval Ravikant: 1:19:30 To what extent is it an existential threat to the UK, given the protests in London?

David Deutsch: 1:19:52 It’s not just those people — it’s everyone who hates our culture being indulged, while everyone afraid of that is being demonized. The government can change that. The processes of criticism and persuasion are not impaired. Almost everything Douglas Murray says is and remains legal.

David Deutsch: 1:20:30 The draconian laws may not succeed. There’s more error correction in the British system than out-voting. The government, no matter how large its majority, knows next week it could go down. Most people don’t think this is a disaster. They think “we don’t want riots, so let’s have laws against riots.” People are arguing these aren’t laws against riots — they’re laws against speech. That argument hasn’t gone down with enough people, and when it does, it’ll change.

David Deutsch: 1:23:14 If the legislation goes through, the next level of error correction is that it’ll never be implemented. The Home Office won’t order police chiefs to spend the money. That’s one thing wrong with the blob, with the Civil Service — it prevents everything from happening.

David Deutsch: 1:24:05 Once that problem is solved, the population problem will also be solved by immigration. Mass immigration is the way to go, and we’ve only got to make sure people who hate this country don’t immigrate into it. Everyone allowed in has to declare they love the country and want to do well in it. If it later turns out they were lying, they can be deported — not for being enemies of Britain, but for lying on the immigration form.