TLDR: Eric Weinstein (Round 3) | Lex Fridman Podcast #134
A summary of the October 29, 2020 episode of The Lex Fridman Podcast.
This is a summary of episode #134 of The Lex Fridman Podcast with Eric Weinstein. Watch the podcast here:
I felt that there were a lot of quality quotes in this episode. Here are some that particularly stood out to me:
Suicide
“I really think that suicide is a big place (and suicidal ideation and self-harm), and we don't talk a lot about it. It's a similar problem to try and talk about Trans. These are umbrella categories, and the commonality is that somebody harms themselves, but we don't know whether that's because of a problem in brain chemistry, because of an event in their life, whether evolutionary programming for suicide is weirdly normal, whether or not it might have a religious motivation… There are too many different forms of self harm. It’s something like the 10th largest killer, or thereabouts. I think that, you know, you could look at it from different angles.” (30:00)
Economic Growth, and Looking for ‘New Orchards’
“The US seemed to be the greatest thing in the world in large measure because we hadn't noticed that we were getting a benefit from not having to make a plan for low growth. As long as we had growth, we were in great shape.
A lot of the things that were discovered from the 1800s through the end of the 20th century were discovered because a lot of that just had to do with ‘once you crack the puzzle of getting better instruments, you can see more’. And the more you can see, the more you could make use of what you can see. And it turned out there was lots of stuff to do with germs, or electron orbitals, or the electromagnetic spectrum for example. So we got to do all of those things, and the US roughly corresponded — for a good chunk of its history — with this bonanza.
And so of course we looked like an amazing genius country. Imagine that you can sell a car and you don't have to put in seat belts. You don't have to put in airbags. You don't have to put in rear view mirrors or sensors. You could save a lot of money on a car by not putting in all of the stuff to keep things from going wrong. I think that's what we had. We had a machine that, as long as growth was insanely good, we put the riches and spoils back into the system and made more genius stuff, and we carried along the good chunk of humanity — hundreds of millions of people. We did not have a plan for what happens when the growth goes below the stall speed of our society.”
“I use this analogy of the Orchard because everyone talks about low hanging fruit. They know the concept of low hanging fruit, but they don't think in terms of orchards. So they say things like: “You think we've picked all the low hanging fruit, but I believe in the infinite inventiveness of the human mind!” That doesn't even work as an analogy. What if the idea is we only picked all of the low hanging fruit here, and then we're having this stupid argument about low hanging fruit, and we're not going and looking for new orchards. We're not planting new orchards, were not looking for forests… We’re just sitting here arguing about low hanging fruit. So my claim is there's probably a lot more low hanging fruit, and it's not here. It's in other orchards.” (42:20)
No Fairness and Safety Without Growth
“Imagine some ant goes and finds a new source of food, right? And then it comes back to the colony and says: “Hey, I think I found a new source of food,” and the initial reaction is: “You're not authorized to find food.” “Why would you try to go find new food?” “And by the way, I think the fact that you think you're allowed to go find new food shows how privileged you are as an ant.” “Get out of the colony, kill him, kill him!” Well, that's probably not a great model for finding new orchards.
What we find is that where there’s a system that allows somebody to ascend without a lot of gatekeeping, you can [go look for new orchards]. I saw this happen in hedge funds. Hedge funds, for a while, hoovered up a lot of talent because they were places that had funding and had freedom. And in general, really smart people want to be free, and they don't want to think a lot about how they're gonna feed themselves. They want to get lost in their minds. So you can either give them productive places to play, dangerous places to play… They're either gonna break into computers or find vaccines for you or build bombs or build companies.
And we're not providing for the people who have to disrupt and have to innovate. We’re so focused on this other thing, “fairness and safety.” And fairness and safety, by the way, are really important. I don't want to denigrate them. But the singular focus on fairness and safety without, in the same breath, being focused on growth and discovery and creation is going to doom us. We're always talking about divvying up the pie that is as opposed to the pie that will be. Imagine that you spend all your time trying to divvy up the 13th century pie and you destroyed your ability to get to the 20th century. You'd be an idiot.” (46:30)
Violence as an Abstract Class
“Imagine you're coding up violence as an abstract class. Violence is defined relative to a context. Let's call it meta-violence because we already have a term for physical violence. So we have meta-violence and physical violence. I would say that physical violence is subclassed from meta-violence. Meta-violence is the disruption of a system. For example, if a cell dies, it can die through apoptosis or necrosis. Apoptosis is controlled — programmed — cell death. Necrosis is just like “okay, this didn't work.” That was a violent disruption of the system.” (1:04:00)
Break-Glass-in-Case-of-Emergency People
“Every society is supposed to have a collection of what I call Break-Glass-in-Case-of-Emergency People. These are people who are universally loved and trusted by your society. For example, David Attenborough, the great British naturalist and presenter, recently came on Instagram — he's worried about the planet. And I said, look, there are very few of these people left. Let's pay attention, find out what he has to say. Maybe maybe he's gonna be an ass. Maybe he's gonna be an idiot. Maybe he's gonna say wrong things. Don't know. Tell me about your top ten universal American heroes.” (1:39:40)
Responsible Conspiracy Theorizing
“First of all, when evil wants to operate it scale, it needs to make sure that people don't try to figure out evil. From first principles, you have to realize that evil must not want it investigated. The most efficient way to keep yourself from being investigated — if you are a an evil institutional player who needs to do this repeatedly — is to invest in a world in which no one can afford to say the word conspiracy. You will notice that there is a special radioactivity around the word conspiracy. We have provable conspiracies. We have admitted to conspiracies. You have been invited to conspiracy. There is no shortage — conspiracies are everywhere! Some of them are mundane. Some of them are like price fixing cartels, or trade groups are generally speaking conspiracies. So the first thing you have to realize is that all of us are in a memetic complex where you can be taken off the chessboard by saying “conspiracy theory.” It’s done, one move. It's like a one line proof — “We don't have to listen to Lex, he said he was a conspiracy theorist on this show.” Okay, that is partially distorting our conversation.”
“There is responsible conspiracy theorizing. You look at the history of unearthed conspiracies just like you would with any other topic. Just think about how different the rules in your mind are for conspiracy theorizing versus X theorizing where X could be anything. It's like if I say to you, “Average weight is not the same between widely separated populations,” you'd say “Yeah.” I'd say, “Average height is not the same between widely separated populations,” you’d say “Yeah.” Then I’d say, “In fact, no continuous variable that shows variation should be expected to be identical between widely separate populations,” “Of course Eric” “Like IQ.” “Whoa, hold on!” Right? So we have a violent reaction to specific topics. So the first thing I want to do is just to notice that conspiracy has that built into everyone's mind.” (2:28:40)
This last quote makes me think of a scene from The Usual Suspects:
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Good stuff Sav, plenty of material and perfect ending!