Making Sense - Sam Harris - #317 — What Do We Know About Our Minds？

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.840 well recent developments in ai have been interesting i am sure i will do many more podcasts on this

00:00:55.100 topic but for the moment some people have asked whether gpt4 and its rapid adoption have changed

00:01:04.600 my views at all about ai and ai risk as some of you know i did a ted talk on the topic of artificial

00:01:13.240 general intelligence in 2016 and that's available on youtube and elsewhere presumably and nothing has

00:01:22.460 really changed about my concern for agi and alignment artificial general intelligence and

00:01:29.260 the problem of creating it such that it is aligned with our interests it's probably a worse problem

00:01:37.080 now than i thought it was because the main change here is that the suddenness with which ai has improved

00:01:45.300 and the way in which we have blown past all of the landmarks that ai safety people have carefully erected

00:01:53.020 that has alarmed me and many other people because in all my conversations with people like nick bostrom

00:01:59.760 and max tegmark and eliezer yukowsky and stewart russell it was more or less an explicit expectation

00:02:08.760 that as we cross the final yards into the end zone of human level intelligence even under conditions

00:02:15.480 of an arms race which are not at all ideal for solving the alignment problem but even in that case there would

00:02:22.460 be a degree of caution that would sober everyone up and so for instance the most powerful ai models

00:02:29.980 wouldn't be connected to the internet or so it was thought and they obviously wouldn't have apis

00:02:37.000 they wouldn't be put into the hands of millions of people at the outset but with gpt4 we've blown past

00:02:46.160 all of that and so now it's pretty clear that we're developing our most powerful ai more or less in the

00:02:53.400 wild without fully understanding the implications so in my view this does nothing to suggest that we're

00:02:59.620 better placed to solve the alignment problem and that problem seems to me to be as big as ever

00:03:04.420 and it has also magnified the near-term risk of things going haywire due to unintended consequences

00:03:09.960 and potential malicious uses of narrow ai and with gpt4 it's almost like we've done our first

00:03:17.740 above ground nuclear test and we've seen the flash of very impressive ai and now many of us are just

00:03:27.240 waiting for the blast wave of hoaxes and lies to knock everything over now i hope i'm wrong about

00:03:35.040 this but i'm half expecting the internet to be eventually inundated by fake information by lies

00:03:44.120 and half-truths to a degree that could render it totally unusable i mean just imagine not being able

00:03:51.560 to trust the authenticity of most photos and videos and audio and text i mean imagine what the internet

00:04:00.840 becomes when ai generated fan fiction crowds out everything else then imagine the cultic entanglement

00:04:10.600 with all this misinformation on the part of billions of people globally it seems like it could be

00:04:17.220 ivermectin and adrenochrome and dogecoin and catfishing scams and ransomware and who knows what else

00:04:25.120 for as far as the eye can see and even the best case scenario could still look totally uncanny i mean

00:04:34.180 let's say we solve the misinformation problem though how we're going to do that is anybody's guess but

00:04:39.800 even if we did what will people want when all valid information can be produced by machine

00:04:47.160 all art and science and philosophy when even the smartest and most creative people can be taken out

00:04:55.160 of the loop what will we want then and for some things i think we just want results i don't care where

00:05:02.840 the cure for cancer comes from i just want it right so there's no future in artisanal oncology just give

00:05:11.000 us the winning algorithm but what about non-fiction writing if you just want the answer to a specific

00:05:17.320 question i think ai will be fine if you ask chat gpt to tell you the causes of world war ii it does a

00:05:25.560 pretty good job but this will never substitute for reading churchill provided you care to know how the

00:05:32.840 world looked to churchill himself and not to some credible simulacrum of churchill so i don't think

00:05:40.280 anyone knows how all of this is going to transform our relationship to information but what i'm experiencing

00:05:47.000 personally now is a greater desire to make contact with the real world to see my friends in person to

00:05:54.440 travel to be out in nature to just take a walk and it may sound self-serving to say this but podcasts

00:06:02.680 and audiobooks are becoming more and more important for this i still spend a tremendous amount of time

00:06:08.600 in front of a screen and reading physical books but i now spend almost as much time listening to audio

00:06:16.920 because the difference between being stuck at my desk and taking a three-hour walk or a hike

00:06:22.680 and being able to do that and still call it work is just such an amazing have your cake and eat it too

00:06:31.960 experience and while all of this is still being enabled by a smartphone the effect on my life is

00:06:38.040 quite different from being married to one's phone for other reasons listening to audio really is different

00:06:45.240 than endlessly checking email or slack or twitter or something else that is fragmenting your attention

00:06:53.320 anyway it's pretty clear we're witnessing an ai arms race and gold rush and that things are about to get

00:07:00.120 very interesting and it seems quite reasonable to worry that the landscape of incentives is such that we

00:07:07.320 might wind up someplace truly undesirable in fact someplace that actually no one wants to be and we might

00:07:15.560 arrive there despite everyone wanting to avoid such an outcome so there's a lot to figure out and i am

00:07:22.680 sure i will do a few more podcasts on this topic before i'm replaced by a bot that does a far better job of it

00:07:29.320 and now for today's podcast today i'm speaking with paul bloom paul is a professor of psychology at the

00:07:37.400 university of toronto and also a professor emeritus of psychology at yale his research explores the

00:07:44.040 psychology of morality identity and pleasure and he is the recipient of many awards and honors including

00:07:52.360 most recently the million dollar claus j jacobs research prize he's written for many scientific journals

00:07:59.320 such as nature and science for the new york times the new yorker the atlantic monthly and elsewhere

00:08:06.920 he is the author of eight books including against empathy just babies how pleasure works the sweet spot

00:08:15.400 and his new book is psych the story of the human mind which we discuss in this conversation

00:08:22.600 we cover many topics here including fiction as a window onto psychology recent developments in ai

00:08:29.480 the tension between misinformation and free speech the difference between bullshitting and lying

00:08:35.880 truth versus belonging reliance on scientific authority the limits of reductionism consciousness

00:08:43.320 versus intelligence freud behaviorism the unconscious mind confabulation the limitations of debate

00:08:52.840 language language coco the gorilla mental health happiness behavioral genetics

00:09:00.920 birth order effects living a good life the remembered and experiencing selves and other topics

00:09:09.080 anyway it's always great to talk to paul and now i bring you paul bloom

00:09:13.400 i am here with paul bloom paul thanks for joining me again great to talk to you again sam i've lost count

00:09:25.560 but i i am confident that you are my uh my returning champion and most frequent guest so uh congratulations if

00:09:33.720 you if you need yet another honor to add to your to the trophy to keep on the mantel yeah it's a funny

00:09:38.600 thing to put in your cv yeah i'd like to see that please put it in your cv i would like to see the reactions

00:09:44.200 to that yeah some some dean's gonna be scratching his head but i i do i do take it as an honor i i like

00:09:50.760 talking with you well people love hearing from you so um this is not uh not altruism directed in in

00:09:56.840 your direction this is pure wise selfishness on my part so but you have a new book which um is the uh

00:10:04.120 the nominal occasion for this conversation and that book is psych the story of the human mind which we'll

00:10:10.760 talk about this is really your um you have produced a essentially a psych 101 course in super accessible

00:10:18.920 non-boring format for uh the general public so that's great and uh people enjoy it that that's exactly

00:10:25.800 that's that's a nice way of putting it i i aspire to do exactly that which is present the whole story

00:10:31.160 of psychology but uh you know i i hate reading textbooks i couldn't bear to write one and i try

00:10:36.440 to put it in in a way that people could enjoy it and and and also textbooks have a sort of uh neutrality

00:10:43.160 and objectivity and you know by i i aspire towards that i try to tell the story in kind of a straightforward

00:10:48.680 way but i also often give myself the luxury to to weigh in on different debates you can't do that in

00:10:54.200 the textbook no this is not at all textbook like but it does cover the full sweep of what we know

00:11:01.400 or what we think we know or what we are embarrassed not yet to know about the human mind yeah so yeah

00:11:07.960 and there's a lot we don't know i know i know there's some other topics we might want to touch

00:11:12.200 before we jump into the book but um how do you feel about the state of our understanding of the human

00:11:19.560 mind at this point i i guess you and i have spoken about this before i think with specifically with

00:11:25.160 respect to parenthood and how surprised we were to realize even you being a developmental psychologist

00:11:33.240 how little science informed our day-to-day experience of parenting how do you feel about

00:11:39.880 the relevance of of science to living a good life all together at this point guardedly positive

00:11:47.400 i i wouldn't have written a book if i didn't feel like psychology had interesting things to tell us

00:11:53.080 about questions that matter a lot like uh you know how to give how to live a life of happiness how to um

00:12:00.280 how much can we trust our memories how does language work even questions which have become quite quite

00:12:05.720 urgent these days with with the the dawn of ai and whatever revolution we're now going through i think

00:12:12.680 psychology has a lot to say about it on the other hand i try to be honest in the book we've we've

00:12:18.760 a lot of our findings are not as robust as we thought they were and i still believe and i don't

00:12:24.040 know who's who said it for maybe chomsky said this uh very which is that you could learn a lot more

00:12:30.520 from a good novel or a good tv series or a good movie from a psychology textbook if somebody was going

00:12:35.720 to say what's a marriage like what's it like to raise teenagers what's it what's it like to grow

00:12:41.560 old i wouldn't point him to a psychology textbook i'd point him to some good novels yeah that's

00:12:47.480 interesting i i never i mean i used to be a big reader of fiction and then at some point things

00:12:54.360 flipped and now i'm i gotta think i'm 20 to 1 non-fiction to fiction or or probably worse than that

00:13:01.560 it could be 50 to 1 but in recent years i have kind of arrived at that epiphany myself it's just

00:13:08.280 there's so much to learn about human life through fiction and you don't you it seems strange to say

00:13:15.160 that because it is fiction but yeah what you're seeing is are you know the best attempts of some

00:13:21.560 of the smartest and most creative people to capture the substance of human experience and it's you know

00:13:29.560 some of the most compelling attempts at that are by definition what we have singled out as the most

00:13:36.040 valuable forms of of literature and i guess we could add you know film and television here as well

00:13:42.600 but it seems strange to say it but it is in some cases our most accurate window on to at minimum the

00:13:49.560 lives of others yeah and i think a a good writer a good filmmaker has insights into the lives of others

00:13:57.080 often from their own experience and and there's something about it which is often more powerful

00:14:04.600 and more transcendent than what you get through psychological research you know you know you

00:14:10.360 you see a movie like like tar and you you hear about you know you learn about artistic enterprise and

00:14:16.520 about cancellation about good and evil uh the banshees movie lovely meditation on friendship and you know

00:14:23.560 i don't know whether things will ever be different whether whether it'll be a point where i'll say

00:14:26.760 no no check out check out the research it'll tell you more there's certainly things the research could

00:14:30.920 tell you that the novelist never could and so maybe it's a matter of staying in our lane well what

00:14:36.520 do you this is going to be a disconcertingly large question but what do we know about the human mind

00:14:44.120 at this point the year is 2023 if you had to distill what we know or what we think we know at this point

00:14:51.880 to somebody who really knew nothing about the last 150 years of mind science what do you think we know

00:15:01.480 we don't have a theory of the human mind and i don't think we ever will not because of our inadequacies

00:15:08.440 but because the mind is many things and so in some way if you ask what do we know about a human body

00:15:13.800 i have a feeling that an anatomist or a physiologist well you know let me tell you about the heart let

00:15:18.360 me tell you about the spleen let me tell you about the ankle bones and so we know a fair amount about

00:15:24.280 the different components of the mind we know we know some surprising things about memory surprising

00:15:29.720 about personality language motivation sex and generally so so trying to maybe stalling for time

00:15:37.800 if you ever try to answer your question we know the mind is the brain we are we we don't exactly

00:15:42.840 know how the brain gives rise to consciousness but we know how the brain gives rise to intelligence

00:15:47.640 it's not so dissimilar to to any other intelligent machine that we now possess we know that a lot of

00:15:53.640 our mental life is the product of natural selection we know a lot of it is the product of cultural

00:15:58.760 evolution we know and in here you know i'll give a shout out to freud we know a lot of the most

00:16:04.200 interesting stuff isn't accessible to our consciousness we know we're often conflicted

00:16:09.560 beings we know um emotion where we we know and i i think i think we know a lot of my colleagues would

00:16:16.120 disagree with me that we could be extraordinarily rational creatures with a capacity for reason and

00:16:22.280 imagination creativity that far exceeds anything else on the planet but we can also be um be fooled we can

00:16:28.920 fool ourselves so a lot of things like that we've set out a nice menu of topics we can hit so i think

00:16:35.960 we should take those piece by piece but um before we do it's honestly it's honestly a problem for a

00:16:42.280 book like this you know i'm looking forward to talking for you about this but previously we've

00:16:46.200 talked about very focused topics of my other books like empathy or topics of mutual interest like

00:16:51.400 like the morality of ai and this is a sprawling book so we'll just take it wherever it goes yeah

00:16:56.440 before we jump into those topics let's talk about recent developments in ai and uh any other thing

00:17:04.680 that has caught your attention of late uh you know before we turned on the mics we were talking about

00:17:10.920 my deleting my twitter account which is not disconnected to what i find most interesting and troubling about

00:17:18.680 what's happening with ai at the moment and i did notice in your book the one thing that it was

00:17:25.320 clearly dated uh you know and it was dated as of you know two months ago embarrass embarrassingly

00:17:32.040 yes but i mean really you could not have you would have had to have been nostradamus to have foreseen

00:17:37.400 how quickly that particular i think paragraph was going to age but you know ai has moved on quite a

00:17:43.880 bit since you published your book and um how has it struck you yeah let's say ai specifically for the moment

00:17:51.800 so just to fess up i have i have a few paragraphs in my book where i i sort of

00:17:56.120 dismiss statistical attempts to to model the human mind and say oh these could never work

00:18:01.800 and uh i think i think recent events got me a bit flat-footed on this i i i'm kind of like to be honest

00:18:08.120 about when i got things when i get things wrong and when things surprise me and and ai uh what has happened

00:18:15.160 with gpt for and being has been a huge shock to me if you had if we you know if one of our

00:18:21.320 conversations a couple of years ago you know you asked me what's going to happen when will we have

00:18:25.560 a system capable of having a perfectly normal conversation saying intelligent things i'd say

00:18:30.680 i don't know 20 years 50 years maybe never and yet here we are and so i'm i'm kind of stunned by

00:18:37.800 it like a lot of people and i've heard i've heard you you devote a few podcasts talking to people like

00:18:42.360 like my friend gary marcus like a lot of people i'm i'm worried about it i don't know where i stand

00:18:47.720 for people who want to sort of halt research for a period but but i think it's an idea worth taking

00:18:52.920 seriously i'm i'm not really necessarily endorsing the idea that that it will kill us all but and you

00:19:00.120 made the argument a while ago if the odds are like five percent or ten percent that's worth taking rather

00:19:05.400 seriously and and as a psychologist i wonder how much the success of models like gbt for tell us

00:19:14.520 about how our minds work yeah yeah i mean it might on that last point it might not tell us much at all

00:19:20.840 or or we certainly need not to constitute its own form of intelligence that disrupts our lives or benefits

00:19:28.760 us immensely depending yeah i mean i think that's a deep point yeah i i really think i my answer to

00:19:34.840 the question is that humans do not learn do not achieve our intelligence in anywhere anything like

00:19:41.400 the way these large language models do it bears no resemblance to the development of a child and yet

00:19:48.200 they have an intelligence of some sort and so maybe there's more i mean actually i do think that

00:19:53.560 to suggest there's more than one way to become smart yeah i mean there's a few red herrings here

00:19:59.160 i think we should dispense with one is the confusion about the importance of consciousness here and and

00:20:06.840 and any connection uh necessary or otherwise between consciousness and intelligence i we simply don't

00:20:13.320 know you know how and when consciousness emerges and whether it comes along for the ride at a

00:20:19.960 certain level of complexity and a certain level of intelligence or not but there's simply no

00:20:25.720 question that we have built intelligent machines and we're continuing to build them and they are

00:20:32.440 intelligent you know i.e competent whether or not there is ever anything that it's like to be those

00:20:39.320 machines i think it's an important question in its own right but it's quite separable from whether

00:20:45.560 intelligence itself is substrate independent and whether it's you know whether it can be aligned

00:20:50.840 or unaligned with human interests and and whether we might be building systems that we may one day

00:20:58.840 lose control of right it's just that consciousness is a completely separate question there and it has

00:21:05.240 ethical importance because we're building machines that are conscious then we're building machines that can

00:21:10.280 suffer uh or be made happy and you know that's a an important thing to have done or to avoid doing

00:21:17.160 but the more interesting case here for me is that i i think we're in danger of just losing

00:21:23.160 sight of whether the question of consciousness is even interesting anymore because we'll be in the

00:21:29.000 presence of machines that are passing the turing test perfectly they're virtually doing that

00:21:34.600 they're doing that now in a text-based way and at a certain point they're going to seem conscious and

00:21:40.120 we're going to treat them as though they were conscious whether or not we ever know the ground

00:21:44.920 truth there i i agree i every word of that the question of of what it is to become intelligent

00:21:51.960 is kind of a bread and butter scientific question you know computers can do intelligent things brains

00:21:56.440 can do intelligent things we have some conception of how how we could build a machine that could play

00:22:01.320 chess or carry on a conversation and how our brains do that too the question of consciousness as you

00:22:07.000 put it is it is entirely independent but also it's going to be important because you know there's um

00:22:13.960 there was a guy at google blake lamone i think who um who was was working with a chatbot and and

00:22:20.280 became convinced that it was sentient and you know google i think put him on leave or something because

00:22:25.000 he was protesting that it was now held as a slave it should have its own rights its own legal protection

00:22:30.200 and he came in for a lot of mockery which a lot of it i think was was unfair but the question he

00:22:36.200 struggled with is something which is going to happen more and more and more and more we're going to build

00:22:39.720 these machines it's going to be increasingly complicated and when say we have a we have we're

00:22:44.920 in a situation where each of us owns one that regularly interacts with us has wonderful conversations

00:22:50.200 with us seemingly has empathy and compassion for us gives us good advice we talk to it all the time

00:22:56.600 it will be inescapable to see it as conscious and so people will be will ask is this correct and

00:23:04.440 it's of moral importance if it's conscious you you know it comes under you know it comes under the

00:23:09.240 scope of what you've called a moral landscape you can't do bad things to it you shouldn't

00:23:13.480 and but we have no idea how to find out you know and and that's that's going to be a deep problem

00:23:19.000 and that's a problem which is going to bite us on ass pretty soon the only thing that has changed

00:23:23.080 for me since the emergence of chat gpt and its uh cousins is uh that i've grown more concerned

00:23:32.760 about the near-term chaos and harms of you know ai that that falls short of of agi artificial general

00:23:42.440 intelligence i just i just think these tools are so powerful and so disorienting in and of themselves

00:23:50.120 that um i mean i just want to think about turning this technology loose to produce misinformation

00:23:58.840 uh which many people you know will i i mean unless the ai becomes a perfect remedy for that sort of

00:24:06.280 thing it just seems like our information landscape is going to get so gummed up with what is essentially

00:24:13.960 persuasive spam yeah that i just don't know how we talk or think about anything in public

00:24:21.800 ironically what seems a step in the direction of democratizing the search for knowledge

00:24:27.240 i think will quickly pendulum swing into even greater gatekeeping because you know only trusted

00:24:35.640 sources of information it's like one example here is that you know if you when you think about the

00:24:40.680 you know deep fakes and deep fakes of video and audio and and just images photos becoming

00:24:48.040 so persuasive that you just you simply can't tell whether this is a real video of you know putin

00:24:54.760 declaring uh you know that he's launched all his missiles or not like only an ai could do it and

00:25:00.520 maybe an ai can't do it i i just think at a certain point we're going to declare epistemological

00:25:06.440 bankruptcy and say something like okay well if an image hasn't come from getty images that's

00:25:12.520 we can't trust that it's an actual image of anything right and and you know there'll be a

00:25:17.320 hundred versions of that sort of thing what we're just what we're seeing is a greater siloing of

00:25:23.480 information and a greater role for gatekeepers i mean it obviously could play out differently but

00:25:28.440 that's sort of what i'm expecting here because what digital information is going to be taken at face value

00:25:33.560 when again i'm thinking like this is not years away this is weeks or months away yeah i mean the

00:25:40.440 gatekeepers themselves may be ais we might be envisioning the beginning of an arms race where

00:25:45.720 where people are using them to distribute you know false news and misinformation and other people are

00:25:50.360 using to filter it out you could imagine and i think that the science fiction writer neil stevenson

00:25:55.720 had a scenario like this which we'll all have a we'll all have a personal system that that uses

00:26:01.240 our own preferences to filter things out and try to to separate the fakes from the originals but i it

00:26:08.760 might reach a point that no matter how smart you are how smart not an ai is it can't tell a fake

00:26:13.640 from the original and then you go back to where does it come from where's the imprint and i could just

00:26:19.080 see the world's going to change in that regard and i want to ask you do you use gpt four or three

00:26:26.600 or being in your everyday life not yet you know insofar as i have played around with it i've been

00:26:32.600 underwhelmed by what has come back to me i'm overwhelmed by the prospects for manufacturing

00:26:40.680 semi-persuasive disinformation uh and also just getting confused it's like you you ask it a question

00:26:46.600 and it will confidently tell give you an answer and then you when you see that some of its answers are

00:26:52.280 in fact hallucinations it's it's um disconcerting to think about ever relying on it you know in a

00:26:59.720 fully confident way i mean i gotta think it's only going to get better with respect to its error rate

00:27:05.240 but it just seems that we're very close to someone being able to ask um you know chat gpt4 or let's say

00:27:14.840 five uh you know write me a medical journal article in the style of jama about um you know how dangerous

00:27:26.120 mrna vaccine technology is and uh give me you know exactly 110 references and the better that gets you

00:27:35.400 know it's just like you could produce you know fake journal articles by the ream and just populate the

00:27:42.200 world with them i just don't know the sheer scale of it right i mean the fact that we might find

00:27:48.760 ourselves in a world where most of what is online is fake i just think that's possible and i'm not

00:27:56.920 sure what we're going to do about it and you're right that somewhat paradoxically this could force

00:28:02.360 a move back to more respect more weight more value given to sort of trusted traditional authorities

00:28:08.360 where you know if you if if you hear about a video you see a video you might then have to go to the

00:28:14.680 new york times website to see if it's confirmed or not confirmed you go back to people or whatever

00:28:19.800 whoever you trust but and in some way this is a very old problem the problem of forging signatures

00:28:25.800 and legal documents and so on but social media magnifies it a thousand times over so i actually don't

00:28:32.440 know if this is a change of topic or the same topic but you did you did leave twitter and and i've heard

00:28:37.400 you talk about why it seemed like your reasons for leaving twitter were a little bit independent

00:28:42.440 of what we're talking about now yeah well that the misinformation piece was important but it was

00:28:48.360 really misinformation as applied to me i mean i became you know the trending topic of the day and it

00:28:55.000 was a distortion of what i actually said and you know in certain cases meant to say because in this

00:29:02.520 case it wasn't i wasn't speaking especially clearly i mean the reason why i left was i i just

00:29:08.360 noticed that i had reached a kind of tipping point where twitter was obviously making my life worse

00:29:15.880 right and it was just it was just unambiguous whatever story i could tell myself about the benefits

00:29:21.240 of you know the good parts or just the necessity of staying engaged with it as a source of information

00:29:27.960 you know kind of taking the pulse of the world moment to moment as i imagined i was doing checking

00:29:33.400 twitter compulsively it just it was making me a worse person in particular it was making me see the

00:29:42.520 worst of other people in a way that i was i became convinced was a distortion of what the way the world

00:29:48.600 is i mean the people people are not as bad as they were appearing to me to be on an hourly basis you

00:29:55.400 know day after day week after week month after month and really i mean i was on for 12 years and

00:30:00.920 yeah it was just getting worse and worse but it did reach a tipping point when i you know trumpistan

00:30:07.160 went berserk in response to you know something i'd said on another podcast and a couple of things were

00:30:13.880 interesting about that one is that you know while in you know red-pilled twitter there had been a just a

00:30:20.680 complete you know run on the bank of my reputation right i mean like this was you know i was completely

00:30:27.160 defenestrated in my world and and really in any place i care about nothing had happened right and so

00:30:37.320 it was strange to see i mean there's this phrase twitter isn't real life which i think is can be

00:30:42.520 misleading because i think you know twitter can get people elected president and lots of things can

00:30:47.720 happen and and you know if you weren't on twitter you didn't know they were happening for quite some

00:30:51.960 time but there is a sense in which at least for my life it's not real life you know or it became

00:31:00.280 unreal and you know having gotten off of it i'm just i'm amazed at the difference in my life and it's

00:31:08.520 not just the obvious difference of i'm not hearing from 10 000 psychopaths on a daily basis or people who

00:31:13.880 are effectively behaving like psychopaths it's just my sense of what the world is has changed now it

00:31:21.160 could be that there's a bit of a delusion creeping in in that you know i'm i'm not in touch with certain

00:31:27.000 forms of information moment to moment but i don't know i just it's like a uh it's almost a pre-internet

00:31:34.600 existence i mean i spent a ton of time online and in front of my computer as it is so it's not pre-internet

00:31:40.680 but something has been stripped out of my life that was a a digital phantom or a golem or you know

00:31:49.480 something awful which um you know i just it's staggering to me how big it's like i can honestly

00:31:56.200 say that getting off twitter is one of the most important things i've done in the last decade right

00:32:01.480 so it's just it's an obscenity to me that i'm even in a position to say that right like that i that i

00:32:06.520 manage to get so confused about what i should be doing with my attention that i could affect such

00:32:14.760 a comprehensive change in my life by simply deleting my twitter account that's just it's staggering to

00:32:20.200 me so it seems there could be two things going on regarding your interactions with people and

00:32:24.760 probably both are true one is going off twitter you simply spend less time dealing with strangers

00:32:30.440 often malevolent or psychopathic strangers the second is something which which i've discovered

00:32:36.280 which is sometimes you you see somebody online and maybe they have an extreme political view maybe

00:32:41.640 they're very you know into donald trump or maybe they're just extremely woke or extremely anti-woke

00:32:46.840 and then you meet them in person and they're invariably more nuanced complicated kinder more

00:32:53.480 interesting less caricatured i'm sure there's exceptions i'm sure there's people who who are just just

00:32:59.160 as bad in real life or maybe worse but um but there's something about the dynamic of social

00:33:04.360 media that that really does at times bring out the worst in us i i gotta say i was a bit i was a bit

00:33:11.320 tempted to follow your lead but i but there's two things one thing is i don't have your status your

00:33:15.880 celebrity status i don't have that that particular problem of being you know dredged over by by by

00:33:21.800 crazy people and the second thing is that i waste a lot of time on twitter but i do find it's often

00:33:28.520 extremely informative as to what's going on in my world yeah yeah well that's that's what kept me

00:33:34.360 hooked for all those years because it you know i was following hundreds of smart creative people who

00:33:40.040 are constantly surfacing interesting articles or exactly paintings or i mean just it was it was my

00:33:47.000 news feed you know so do you do you have i won't put you on on the spot and ask yourself now i know

00:33:53.240 nothing yeah but but but is but no i'm actually more asking is there some character which has four

00:33:58.840 followers a little egg shape that's you just following the same people and no no no i'm really

00:34:04.360 i'm really off i mean i i occasionally have had to check it for you know to do you know research for

00:34:10.360 a podcast or just to get in touch with a specific piece of information but no like i go for weeks without

00:34:17.240 looking at twitter the website and it's not that i haven't lost anything because i again i was i was

00:34:25.400 seeing articles and other things discovered for me by by smart people that i'm i'm surely not

00:34:30.760 discovering myself now but it really does center on the point you just made which is just the distorted

00:34:38.600 sense of other people i knew i was getting yeah but couldn't fully correct for because in some cases

00:34:44.360 is not only these aren't just strangers who i know if i met them over dinner they'd be better

00:34:49.400 than they seem to me on twitter these are people who i actually know and have had dinner with but

00:34:53.960 yeah i could see what they were doing on twitter and it was changing my opinion of them right it's

00:35:00.600 just you know these are now awful human beings who i used to like over dinner but i can't believe

00:35:06.440 they're behaving this way right so it just it i felt like i had been enrolled in a psychological

00:35:11.800 experiment that was that had gone awry you know probably five years ago at least and it just took

00:35:18.840 me a very long time to find reason enough to just bolt for the door and that's um yeah but i when you

00:35:27.000 add the the ai component to it and the misinformation component to it i i'm very worried about our collective

00:35:36.520 ability to have a fact-based discussion about anything i mean even that even the topics i've

00:35:42.120 just raised i mean like my claiming confidently that we have a misinformation problem is the other

00:35:47.720 side of a debate which you know smart people are having now which i think we just can't possibly bring to

00:35:55.560 a satisfactory resolution i mean the other side is we've got people talking about you know media and and

00:36:03.640 and social media censorship and every you know reference to misinformation or disinformation

00:36:10.920 is a covert way of you know the deep state and the the odious establishment trying to suppress

00:36:19.880 the populist democratic epistemology that is struggling to be born right where like usually we just

00:36:27.880 we're trying to to force the overton window into a certain shape uh and position and uh uh make it

00:36:36.760 impossible for people to talk about or think about topics that fall outside of it so we can't even

00:36:43.160 agree about whether misinformation is a thing at this point yeah yeah so yeah i mean i was gonna say

00:36:50.280 just just to go back a little bit in response to you going off but sam you miss so much and the

00:36:56.360 the truth is to some extent you do miss some things you miss some discoveries you miss some some

00:37:00.440 very funny things very clever things but you you also miss stuff that you probably shouldn't be

00:37:05.880 attending to in the first place not because it's necessarily mistaken but because it's the outrage of

00:37:12.280 the day yes it's people getting furious because something happened in this school in nebraska or

00:37:18.360 somebody said this and they're getting you know and in a few days that will go on i'll move to the next

00:37:23.480 an amount of mental energy and i'm speaking personally here that that that gets caught i get

00:37:28.040 caught up in for issues which i actually have no expertise and no intrinsic interest in but but you

00:37:34.200 know we're wired for gossip and hearing oh my god this person said this and now the world's coming

00:37:39.400 to an end and everybody it just just captivates us and and it's it's it's appealing i think to our

00:37:44.920 worst selves yeah it also gives you the sense that you're you're supposed to form an opinion

00:37:50.120 about everything right especially that's right when you have a big platform you know when you have

00:37:55.400 hundreds of thousands or millions of people following you you know something will happen

00:38:00.040 and you'll and you'll feel like okay this is an invitation to comment and it's interesting not to

00:38:05.960 have that space for that kind of micro commentary in my life anymore like i now i have a podcast where i

00:38:12.600 can decide you know whether i want to talk about something but that's a very different decision than

00:38:18.440 whether to you know retweet something or comment on it and the time course of the decision is

00:38:24.760 different you know lots of ephemeral things just fall away before you you have even decided whether

00:38:31.080 or not you they were worthy of your attention or you know worthy to surface in in your commentary about

00:38:36.520 anything and yeah i mean i was just you know i'm missing a lot on twitter no doubt but what i what i was

00:38:42.680 missing when i was on twitter were things like books right like it was becoming harder to read books

00:38:48.920 you know and so uh yeah it's kind of the pace of of one's response to the information one is taking in

00:38:57.560 and it's uh i don't know i mean it's it's it's definitely in that good it's not that it comes with

00:39:03.080 zero cost but i recognize that people have very different experiences on twitter or any other social

00:39:09.640 media site where they happen to be and you know some people who are just putting out you know

00:39:13.720 happy memes are getting nothing but love back and it's they have no idea what i'm talking about but i

00:39:19.320 just um yeah i'm i'm worried that we we have built tools that we can't we don't know how to control and

00:39:25.320 they may in fact not be controllable by us and they're controlling us right they're making certain

00:39:32.600 types of conversation impossible they're making it difficult or or impossible to solve coordination

00:39:40.040 problems that we really have to solve in order to get anything important done in the world and um i

00:39:46.920 just think we they have created a um what seems like just unbridgeable divides in our politics this

00:39:55.800 could have always been the case right and it could there might be analogies to the to the invention of

00:39:59.640 the printing press that yeah where it made the same kind of indelible changes in how we did things or

00:40:06.040 failed to do things but i don't know i just think the the way in which the outrage machine has has no

00:40:13.080 off button and the pace of our engagement with the story of the day the outrage of the day and the way

00:40:21.720 in which that gets memory hold because it's supplanted by a new outrage of the next day and the way

00:40:28.600 that the cycle time of those changes completely obscures long-standing problems that we just do

00:40:36.200 not have the bandwidth to think about you know it really just seems like we have built information

00:40:43.000 tools that we just can't use effectively so i know a lot of people i i i see what you're saying i agree

00:40:49.320 with a lot of it i know a lot of people who are deeply concerned about exactly what you're talking about

00:40:53.640 particularly now with with ai adding something else to the mix and and i share that concern but

00:40:59.400 all of the solutions that gets proposed often make me a bit queasy john height suggests that the social

00:41:05.640 media basically don't have a it doesn't have a like or retweet button you modify the structure so that

00:41:12.120 that you don't get a sort of amplification and piling on gary marcus thinks the government should get

00:41:17.160 involved in in sort of controlling the runaway flow of uh misinformation robert right you know

00:41:24.200 suggests doesn't think it should be mandated but suggests that that we should redesign social media

00:41:28.760 to to pretty much force people to eat their vegetables and you know get exposed to alternative

00:41:34.520 use and i don't know where do you stand on all of that yeah i honestly i don't have um any kind of

00:41:41.240 remedy worked out in my head i mean personally i have just simply defected and that makes the most

00:41:49.000 sense i mean i'm trying to find a way of interacting with information and producing it that seems um like

00:41:57.960 it it has real integrity and it's getting harder to do and i and i just see how siloed everyone has

00:42:06.680 become in their preferred echo chamber and it's um you know i well i don't feel that that has happened

00:42:13.800 to me in any kind of comprehensive way i can just i certainly see people perceiving me on any given

00:42:20.760 topic to have been stuck in in some kind of bubble and take you know covid uh as a clear case right it's

00:42:30.440 like they're the people who think that covid the disease is uh no big deal and you know or even a

00:42:37.320 hoax and those same people tend to think that the vaccines for covid are just the crime of the century

00:42:42.920 and going to kill millions and then you just flip those two toggles uh for the other half of our society

00:42:48.600 and it's uh is there a conversation to have between those two camps on some medium that could possibly

00:42:57.480 converge on a shared set of truth claims to which everyone would you know in the fullness of time

00:43:05.000 give a cent there's a half a dozen other topics that come to mind that are equally polarizing in the

00:43:10.840 current environment i'm just not sure convergence is remotely possible yeah and it to the extent this

00:43:19.880 gets better i don't really see a natural market solution it's on parallel between somebody saying oh my

00:43:26.680 god restaurants fancy restaurants fast food places serve you know food that's extremely bad for us

00:43:32.600 it's salty it's fatty it's it's high calorie it's and so so why don't we just you know create these

00:43:38.760 restaurants that serve much healthier food with you know vegetables well you could do that but no one's

00:43:43.720 going to go to them yeah and similarly you know if you could you could create a new social media site

00:43:49.560 that does things better that discourages exaggeration and caricature that that brings together people

00:43:55.160 with real expertise but twitter is so much more fun yeah well i do think the there are some changes

00:44:02.040 that i've uh banged on about a lot on previous podcasts which i think would make a huge difference

00:44:08.360 i just don't i don't know that it it makes enough of a difference at this point but i i just i do think

00:44:13.720 the business model to which the internet got anchored is largely at fault right so they just the the fact

00:44:19.880 that we have to gain people's attention algorithmically so as to you know maximize ad revenue right that

00:44:27.000 that's the business model for so many of these sites yeah that's a problem and i i do think that if

00:44:33.320 people just subscribed to twitter and uh there were no ads and there was no anonymity and there was you know

00:44:41.800 very clear terms of service it could be much better than it is but again it does you know you know

00:44:49.080 suffer the analysis you just gave it which is if the more you solve the problems i'm worried about

00:44:55.160 in some measure the more boring it might get right there there will be an eat your vegetables component

00:45:04.280 to it but what we have now is just the privileging of misinformation and outrage by the the algorithms

00:45:12.280 and it's yeah there's another dimension of this which has worried me in a different way which is so

00:45:17.880 many of the algorithms are becoming i don't know where it is bespoke they're becoming geared for for us

00:45:24.200 and for me my example is um i i wake up in the middle of the night you know have a bad habit of

00:45:29.640 checking my email and then i sometimes find myself on youtube and more than once an hour has gone by

00:45:36.440 where i've just it was lost time because the youtube algorithm knows what i like and i like

00:45:41.880 k and peel sketches i like certain movie trailers i like this and that and and i just lose time and and

00:45:48.920 this is not a unique experience to me i you know that i forget his name the guy who ran netflix said that

00:45:54.760 our our enemy isn't other streaming services it's sleep you know i feel that that the real the world

00:46:01.400 that's outside of our screens and involves the outside and other people is at a serious disadvantage

00:46:06.760 relative to the algorithm driven feed that you get from twitter or youtube or a million other sources

00:46:13.080 and i i you know you could choose your dystopia some people now i think are thinking of a sort of a

00:46:18.120 skynet matrix dystopia of ai there's another dystopia where we're all just kind of blobs with our

00:46:23.880 vr things perched in front of our faces just whittling away our lives yeah well it's it's definitely

00:46:31.320 worth uh stepping back and taking stock because i mean just again personally i i as i said i i'm i'm

00:46:40.440 i'm embarrassed at at how long it took me to recognize what twitter had become in my life and it's

00:46:48.120 really you know i i was i'm by no means the worst you know casualty of the platform that i can think

00:46:54.840 of i mean there are people who have much more of a twitter problem than i ever had but it's um i mean

00:47:01.400 it's insane to say it but like something like a hundred percent of the truly bad things that have

00:47:09.720 happened in my life in the last 10 years have come from twitter really if i said 90 i i i'm sure i'm

00:47:17.640 underestimating it it's completely crazy just what a what a malign influence it has been on my life

00:47:25.240 and it took me years to just get fed up with it because of and to some degree it's what you um just

00:47:33.720 noticed with respect to the youtube algorithm it's just it's the steady drip of titillating isn't quite

00:47:40.440 the right word but it's reinforcing information of some kind right and yeah yeah and the fact that you

00:47:47.240 you know on twitter it can feel like an entirely wholesome way of satisfying your desire to be in

00:47:55.240 touch with the world and and have your curiosity slaked uh i mean for the longest time it seems like

00:48:01.640 it's that but yeah it's quite a change it's um well i'm wondering what you uh are most concerned

00:48:11.160 about at this moment and then we're going to take a turn to your your book but like what what are you

00:48:15.080 actually uh thinking about you know whether it's uh you know professional capacity or or a personal one

00:48:22.360 what's worrying you these days what's uh you know top of mind as far as um changes in our society that

00:48:29.000 you're uh that you're finding um bewildering or disconcerting yeah i i don't know where to begin

00:48:36.360 and some of it might be you know we're not getting any younger there's a common lament of the old is

00:48:41.960 oh my god things have gone to hell back back in the good old days you know and i think there could be

00:48:47.800 i think maybe the balance the complaining we've been doing i mean ai done right it could be a could

00:48:56.040 be a godsend could transform the world in in such wonderful ways and so much of the social media so

00:49:03.080 you we have really i think done done a fair job of pointing out the bad side but but it's rescued so

00:49:09.000 many people from loneliness people have found communities people have found love and putting

00:49:14.920 aside the misinformation prominent addiction problem we're social beings and some people are not situated

00:49:21.080 that they can get their social satisfaction out with actual people in the real world so they they

00:49:26.440 do it online and i think there's a satisfaction to be had for that too i mean to some extent this

00:49:31.960 speaks to both the positives and negatives of what we're talking about and it goes back to your comment

00:49:36.040 of all the bad things happening to you happening over over twitter which is we are extremely social

00:49:41.560 animals and our reputation is extremely important to us what people think of us i think only psychopaths

00:49:49.160 say i don't care what people think about me and mean it i mean basically having people say terrible

00:49:55.160 things about you lying about you is horrible is horrible and in some way it's far more horrible than

00:50:04.040 bodily pains or bodily damage i mean you ask people i don't know would you rather the whole world think of

00:50:10.360 you as a child molester or would you rather lose an arm i think people would vote for losing arm

00:50:16.440 yeah and and you know so so and similarly that you know people people the reputational boons and

00:50:24.440 and connecting with people and so on has this euphoric feeling for many people and it can be unhealthy or

00:50:30.600 and and and addictive but i think when done properly could be real plus of these algorithms it's

00:50:37.880 interesting i this could be the way it strikes many people or this could just be my own personal

00:50:43.480 idiosyncrasy but the the worst thing about you know reputational maintenance and you know

00:50:49.800 caring about what other people think the the thing that that really is my kryptonite is

00:50:56.200 the misrepresentation of what my views actually are like i i maybe everyone cares about this to the degree

00:51:03.800 i do but i i don't quite see it so it's not just people saying awful things about you is

00:51:10.040 you know it's just like that the truth is if someone accurately characterizes who i am or what

00:51:16.840 i've done or what you know what i think and they hate me for it yeah that's fine right and so like

00:51:23.640 this you know so let's say you know i'm an atheist right and so someone hates me because i'm an atheist

00:51:27.400 right so a fundamentalist christian will say awful things about me because of my atheism okay great there's

00:51:32.840 no problem with that and you know i i there's some outrageous views i i might have and if someone's

00:51:40.200 accurately characterizing them and they think they totally you know holding that view totally discredits

00:51:45.560 me as a person okay there's again no problem with that but it's just the line or about you know what i

00:51:53.480 think that just gets under my skin in a way that is um fairly uh life derranging and it's and that's

00:52:01.560 why i when i see this larger problem of misinformation at scale where you just can't figure out what is

00:52:09.960 true in this blizzard of purported facts it's uh yeah it really worries me that things can go completely

00:52:20.120 off the rails it's not related to your tremendous dislike of trump which of course is shared by many

00:52:26.680 people but i think there's a a certain feature of your dislike of trump that that connects to your

00:52:32.600 anger about the lies and the misinformation which is trump is you know notoriously famously

00:52:38.440 undeniably a bullshitter he's not he's he's not a liar he doesn't care enough to lie he has an

00:52:45.480 utter disinterest in in the truth yeah he'll just say whatever's whatever works for him and if it's

00:52:52.200 true it's true if it's false it's false he doesn't he doesn't care and there's something and and it seems

00:52:57.960 to it seems like like he he started a trend that that he a lot of people both for him and against him

00:53:05.000 have a sort of ethos that well it could be true it's the sort of thing one would say you know and and

00:53:11.240 and you know epistemological crisis is is is a fancy term but it's genuinely frightening when when

00:53:19.160 people just stop caring about the truth because you can't you can't reason properly you can't do

00:53:23.960 politics properly you can't do science properly can't do society properly and and i think that that's

00:53:29.400 that's the problem with that's one of the major problems with the world we live in now yeah that's

00:53:34.280 a distinction that uh you're you're referencing courtesy of uh harry frankfurt the philosopher he wrote

00:53:39.880 wrote this very short book just really an essay but it's a wonderful little book titled on bullshit

00:53:47.000 and um we've discussed him before on the podcast but to remind people that i think it really is a an

00:53:53.480 important distinction he makes the point in the book that the difference between a liar and a

00:53:57.960 bullshitter is that a liar has to be tracking what the truth is in order to insert his lie in a calculated

00:54:05.800 way in the space provided and he's he's observing all of the norms of of reasoning that his his

00:54:13.880 audience is relying upon because he's again he's trying to lie in a way that is undetected and undetectable

00:54:21.640 by logical human beings so he's not gratuitously contradicting himself he's not uh he's trying to

00:54:29.560 conserve the data as much as he can he is tracking truth and and expectations of consistency and every

00:54:36.920 other epistemological norm uh in order to do his nefarious work uh whereas the bullshitter is just

00:54:44.440 talking yeah and just creating a mood and isn't spending any time trying to track what is true or

00:54:53.160 even trying to avoid contradicting what he said five minutes ago because he just like it's a complete

00:55:00.360 it's complete epistemological anarchy right there's just there are there are no standards there's no

00:55:05.400 authorities there's no hierarchies there's no ground truth to be aware of it's just uh you know a blizzard

00:55:12.280 of opinion that's right and we have now what trump did to a degree that i would not have thought

00:55:19.560 possible was exposed that something like half of our society simply doesn't care about torrents of

00:55:27.800 bullshit on the most important topics and the most trivial being spread at you know every hour of the

00:55:33.720 day across the landscape with no concern for truth in sight one way to put it is that liars respect the

00:55:43.640 truth liars might respect the truth more so than somebody who reflexively is honest and never thinks

00:55:49.080 about a liar works hard to orchestrate uh their statements so that it appears true to people

00:55:55.640 and so really works at it says says i i gotta fool people and and a bullshitter just just bullshits

00:56:03.640 you know i i i have a part in my book maybe it's it's it's departed it's the part of the book where i

00:56:09.240 think i disagree with most of my colleagues where it's about rationality and here i'm going to defend

00:56:15.000 i'm not going to defend bullshit but i'm going to defend people who participate in at some level

00:56:20.360 where sometimes people argue well those who believe or purport to believe conspiracy theories and wild

00:56:28.280 views and misinformation are somehow being irrational but unfortunately it's not as simple as that

00:56:36.280 where what rationality is i think is using logic and probability and empirical facts to achieve your

00:56:43.880 goals now if your goal is to get things right then we should be working to find the truth and

00:56:50.200 appealing to science and working on our logic but often for many people the goal is to get along

00:56:55.800 and if you're in a community and uh i don't know everybody there believes that i don't know take an

00:57:00.760 old example barack obama was born in kenya and is is not an american citizen has no legal right to be

00:57:06.120 president and that's what everybody there believes well there's not much truth to it so if you care

00:57:11.160 about truth you're not going to believe it but you probably want to get along to people around you

00:57:15.480 and so you're sort of in this dilemma where the world as a whole would be better if everybody tried

00:57:21.000 to get things right but as individuals in society believing the the common following the common

00:57:27.560 practices believing what other people believe is actually fairly rational yeah i mean it's changing

00:57:33.880 the nature of the game i mean like we're you're we're equivocating on what rational means in these

00:57:39.320 two contexts but yeah i would agree that it's like a you know a hierarchy of needs problem you know you

00:57:46.600 need you need not to be exiled from your community or burned as a witch more than you need to be

00:57:52.440 that's right you need to have an intellectual integrity at least in in this moment but for me that's a

00:57:59.640 statement of a kind of social pathology right that's a community that is not as good as it might be it's

00:58:07.960 certainly not as in touch with norms of error correction that would keep it in touch with reality in an

00:58:15.160 ongoing way and yeah what you're describing it has much more in common with religion than it has in

00:58:23.960 common with science or any other really rational enterprise i mean these are like assenting to

00:58:29.560 certain pseudo truths it represents a kind of loyalty test i mean any invidious comparison we're going to

00:58:35.960 make between religion and politics and science on the other hand is going to swing on on these kinds

00:58:42.600 of distinctions i mean just the difference between wishful thinking and a host of other cognitive biases

00:58:48.600 and being dispassionately guided by you know evidence and argument that's interesting i i i

00:58:56.280 appreciate the distinction i think of it more though as a continuum so religion is one extreme where you

00:59:02.280 know unless you you publicly you know agree assent to the claims made of one true god they may kick you

00:59:09.640 out of town or burn you at the stake politics you know is is close to religion in that regard where you

00:59:16.600 know if you're a member of a political party and you're campaigning and everything you you you

00:59:20.600 should believe certain things and you'll be punished if you're not but i think even something like

00:59:25.800 science science in sort of a pure sense has has norms of rejecting authority and norms of skepticism

00:59:34.040 throughout but day to day if somebody is too skeptical about claims they're going to get kicked out of the club

00:59:41.160 yeah yeah well that's something that i have uh struggled to make sense of in public for you know

00:59:49.800 audiences that seem deeply confused about what the norms are here and it's hard to i mean this is

00:59:55.080 really the the sense in which science is not a science it's an art right it's like there is no way

01:00:01.800 we can at least i don't think there's a way we can make an algorithm of this process where we

01:00:08.120 value authority and then we discount its relevance to any specific claim right so like you know that's

01:00:17.560 right as you say we overturn it routinely in science whenever you make a breakthrough you're

01:00:23.320 very often proving some prior consensus wrong and we know that you know a nobel laureate in any discipline

01:00:32.120 can be wrong and doesn't need to be taken seriously if he or she is wrong and you know a lowly

01:00:40.200 graduate student can be right and the rightness or wrongness of any claim has absolutely nothing to do

01:00:46.600 with the cvs or the reputations of the of the people making those claims and yet as a time-saving device

01:00:54.120 we routinely rely on authority and consensus because probabilistically what 97 percent of chemists

01:01:02.520 believe about the structure of a given substance is our best bet at understanding what that substance

01:01:09.800 is by the lights of chemistry and that remains true until a flaw in the consensus is discovered by some

01:01:18.520 you know lone genius who then overturns it so it's a specialization problem and a time management problem

01:01:24.760 we just we we can't help but rely on authorities because most of the time it makes perfect sense to do that

01:01:31.640 that's exactly right a lot of cognitive neuroscientists could do excellent work

01:01:36.120 but don't fully understand some of the statistics that they're using you know their collaborator may

01:01:40.920 understand it better may not fully understand the physics of the fmri machine that they use and that's fine

01:01:48.520 and you know the graduate student who says i refuse to to work on the study until i understand all of

01:01:54.360 this and to justify it for myself will have a short career you know you gotta you gotta defer yeah i mean

01:02:00.520 there's just no way to be a true polymath at this point well although ironically ai promises to to make

01:02:10.360 that increasingly possible if in fact you we can outsource our thinking confidently to our robot overlords

01:02:18.440 i mean just because then you then you can like you in the in the presence of you know chad gpt 25

01:02:26.680 if any graduate student at any point can say all right you know explain this to me uh and explain it

01:02:32.520 again and get it down to 100 words and okay like when you think of how quickly you would be able to drill

01:02:38.760 down on you know to first principles on anything that interests you and you can outsource the burden of

01:02:46.280 having to remember all of that stuff to the ai it's um it's possible that we could uh you know have

01:02:54.440 more more of a comprehensive ownership of the full set of facts that you know impinge upon any question

01:03:03.800 but still i mean you know that there'll be a some boundary there where you are just accepting that in this

01:03:11.080 case you're accepting that the ai is integrating all of the uh authorities in in a way that that

01:03:19.080 actually works you know so it's and that's it and that's that brings us back to the limitations of

01:03:24.440 current ai i a little while ago wrote an article where i wanted to get some good quotes from psychologists

01:03:30.760 who actually from scholars in general who believed that the replication crisis showed psychology to be

01:03:36.200 deeply flawed and and so i i asked uh gpt3 and it came out with with two amazing quotes exactly what i

01:03:44.520 wanted one from gert gigaranter one from nassim taleb and i knew they were you know they sounded

01:03:49.480 exactly in the style of those people and then of course and of course neither of them existed it just

01:03:54.840 it just plucked them out of thin air yeah and and these sort of hallucinations are a problem

01:04:01.240 man i i you know i felt rather betrayed well i felt lied to get ready it's gonna get worse yeah

01:04:07.560 that's right okay so uh when i asked you what we know about the human mind you gave me uh several

01:04:15.000 facets of of of the answer to this sweeping question one was evolution and its implications another was

01:04:24.440 the brain as the the evolved organ that is uh the the evolved organ that is uh producing everything we we

01:04:30.280 know as uh the mind in our case another was the uh the insight often credited to freud but there have

01:04:40.200 been many variants of it yeah that much of what goes on in us and as us that is mental is not actually

01:04:51.720 conscious right so there's this divide this boundary line between consciousness and what you know

01:04:58.840 following freud we have learned to call the unconscious and and that could be misleading in

01:05:03.640 a variety of ways one of my favorite wittgenstein quotes is how he is said to have responded to this

01:05:09.800 notion of freud's and he says this is i think fairly close to verbatim imagine the difficulties we would

01:05:18.360 experience if we had a language that constrained us to say that when you see nobody in the room

01:05:25.960 you say mr nobody was in the room right so it's just it's the reification of absence right that's

01:05:32.920 the reification of of nothing being there in this case that we could be concerned that there's a

01:05:38.040 reification of the parts of ourselves that we don't experience uh as though as a storehouse of

01:05:44.040 potentially conscious mental states and then there's just this i guess related issue of

01:05:50.920 reductionism and emergence right so the the the mind the mind and anything any part of it we would

01:05:58.040 want to discuss you know take an emotion or or an act of cognition is an emergent phenomenon which

01:06:05.400 when understood at the level of its you know micro physical constituents seems to um to some minds

01:06:14.600 seems to promise a a smooth reduction to more basic facts which are the real facts but in other

01:06:20.600 cases that seems like a a fool's errand and that there's even in the presence of perfect ai and

01:06:27.880 infinite computing resources we're never going to be talking about

01:06:32.040 human scale experience purely in terms of neurotransmitters and synaptic connections

01:06:39.400 much less atoms and and uh subatomic particles

01:06:43.400 that that's it let me stop on that because that that's that's a deep point when i i i have my i think

01:06:48.920 my my first main chapter is on the brain and i say you know the mind is the brain i talk about that

01:06:53.560 talk about the history of that talk about how that you know as best we understand how that works

01:06:58.120 but i'm very i didn't spend the rest of the chapter sort of saying a lot of people then think that

01:07:05.720 wow so the real science is neuroscience and in the end we're not going to talk in terms of beliefs and

01:07:10.680 desires and emotions at all right it's all going to be you know if you'd like to continue listening to

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 20, 2023

#317 — What Do We Know About Our Minds？

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