YouSaid · the spoken record

Matjaž Leonardis

lines on the record: 39
first: 2020-08-22
most recent: 2020-08-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So that's, yeah, I have sort of the same impression. So, yeah, I don't want to, I think one of the worst things, perhaps the reason I sort of bring this up is just because I think people often just lack awareness of this. They kind of lack the awareness of the fact that that is kind of the main challenge, or at least one ought to do. And yeah, I guess for that reason, I think it is sort of worth mentioning.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually, no, I don't think so at all. I think that the main problem is just that it is somewhat idiosyncratic, right? So you cannot just sort of give a universal answer. But I think that it's definitely not the case that the world is hostile to it. I think people are very sympathetic to attempts to do that. As basically you illustrate, I think a lot of that is very, very possible.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so I think that is sort of quite a challenge. And as I said, I think I'm terrible at this. There are people who I think the case, as you sort of say, that the whole thing has a bit of a sort of a chicken and egg problem to it, right? Because the whole idea is, well, you can't really contribute anything valuable because you don't know anything about what these people's lives are like, what you can contribute to it. And on the other hand, it's kind of difficult to join a conversation because you don't have anything yet to contribute to it, right? And so there are already sort of all kinds of idiosyncratic ways that I think this sort of happens and gets solved. But there isn't anything, it's not an impossible problem to solve, but it does require, I think, quite a bit of an experimentation. I don't think I'm the best person at this by any stress.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often it won't be valuable to everybody, it will only be valuable to a subsection of those people. And those people might not actually know in advance that that's what they would want. And for that reason, it's actually quite difficult to sort of put, you know, that seems to be a difficult thing to kind of put online for that reason. And yeah.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like there is this idea that you could create a kind of a, there is often this idea that one could easily create kind of a list of all unsolved problems in a given field and just put it on the internet. And many people kind of think, well, this seems so simple. Like, why doesn't anybody ever do that? And I think that is that is actually incredibly difficult to do. I think that the kinds of information that you would have to put online is just incredibly, it's very, very unclear how one does that. And the key thing is that the key thing to realize is that, well, first of all, there really is no such thing as an unsolved problem, I think, as conventionally understood. There are just a bunch of people. And, you know, like one can form a view that creating something would be valuable to them.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that when it comes to that, I think my impression at least is that the most important thing is to connect with other people or groups of people that are doing something because there you will, you know, again, find something that you can contribute to as well as get support for doing so and so on. I think that that is”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Textbook wasn't developed so that somebody could learn it. It was created by somebody who was trying to do something or understand something. And it was useful in a particular context. And that's why people adopted it. And that's why it eventually ended up in that textbook. But what often happens is that then that context goes away and all that remains is a textbook. And so you are left with all of these irrelevant seeming information that was actually relevant to somebody at some point, but it's no longer relevant to anybody that reads it or at least not immediately relevant to how they approach it. So those are some of my basic thoughts on like what I sometimes see kind of go weird. But I think people, you know, polymath is not something you learn to be. It's something you unlearn to be, as some people would put it.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advance a particular need. And I think what is most important, if one wants to just have broad interest, I think the most important thing is to just pursue whatever you're interested in, not be afraid or think that you can't understand it. And paradoxically, not actually trying to achieve any particular change in yourself, but rather just sort of going where the story goes. Reading history is perhaps sort of helpful because a lot of books are kind of written with these ideas that I think are misconceptions in mind. But there is a substantial, but history of things often gets around that because every single one you see in a textbook wasn't written to be put in a”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or trying to change it. It's only in very special circumstances that you kind of try to think of yourself in that way. And I think a lot of what happens when one tries to do that is actually quite counterproductive. Like, for example, there are a lot of ideas that if you want to learn something, you can't just do it through a smoosis. You have to be very, very systematic about it. And I think that is basically completely false. I think that, and again, this sort of leads people in this sort of very, very counterproductive direction where they think they need to study the fundamentals of something. And then there are, first of all, they think they need to study a subject. Then you think, okay, first I need to study the fundamentals, then the intermediate level, then the advanced levels, and all of these levels are fiction. There is sort of none of that there. And all of these ideas were actually developed. They have always been developed to solve a particular problem.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, the first piece of advice is that I would give is that you should never take advice from me. The second thing I would say, though, it actually relates, again, this sort of relates to just a particular problem that I think people are naturally interested in everything. And it is only through, again, it's actually very similar to the thing we talked about at the beginning. I think that the same phenomenon that happens with the way people think about science sort of happens with learning. So, you know, people learn all their life. And in fact, people learn all the time. Like you interact with information all the time. It changes you, but you never think, you never consciously think of changing yourself by doing that.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I said that it's somewhat unclear to me that this thing that I mentioned about the need for regularity, I'm not sure if it exists. It's plausible that it exists, but if it does, I don't quite understand how it works. So that's kind of that.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And another thing that can happen in this process is that kind of various kinds of truth can accumulate in these general theories that are not present just in the experience alone. And so I'm not sure if this thing that I just said is his argument or something that or not, but it is, I think, another reason why explanatory theories play such an interesting role in life in general.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is something that I think is kind of worthy of exploration. On the other hand, I think that another thing that is great about explanatory theories is that they allow, and I think that this was another point that he would make, is that they sort of allow for progress, right? Because it's only if you kind of create this universal explanatory theories and you go out there, you will eventually find that something about it doesn't quite work. So you will replace it with another and then another one after that. But what is kind of happening in that process is that you're kind of knowledge of the world is increasing in a way it wouldn't if you just accumulated experiences. Because if you were just accumulating experiences, you might never go out there and try things that your universal theory says you should do and therefore discover that it is false.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where might I disagree? Well, for example, he pointed, so there is this interesting question, right, of what exactly is the role of this universal theories? Like, why do we have them? Why do we think about them? Why do we try to improve them and so on? And his argument was that people actually, his argument was actually quite psychological. It was that people seem to have this need for regularity. And, you know, if you put them in an environment without regularity, people kind of go mad or, you know, at least kind of invent regularity out of thin air. And I think that's a very interesting argument. There is this interesting question of why, if this is true, I can't quite exactly see why this need for regularity exists.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of, I think that the believability of explanatory theories is always higher than the believability of these sort of less likely theories and therefore believability isn't really probability.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That option A has to be more likely than option B. And so the question can be why that is. But I think that this tendency that he talked about sort of explains this phenomenon. The second fact explains the facts you were initially given, but option A, as I called it, doesn't. And I think that this is sort of a part of a general theme where people really do sort of look for, and as I said, believe in explanatory general theories, not by not the sort of content, you know, not kind of the most likely theory. I mean, there are several European languages. I think the German and Slovenian are the two that I know where I think that if you were to translate the word for probability into English, it would be something like believability. And I think that if you interpret probability in that way,”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Likely theories, as it were, but kind of these incredibly informative and therefore informative explanatory and therefore kind of less likely theories. And if you want kind of an example of the fact that people do seem to think about that way, right? There is something known as the conjunction fallacy that would seem to sort of support that. So there is this famous experiment. I think it was popularized by Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. which was I think the sort of case of Linda. So in this experiment, you're told about a woman and you're given a bunch of information that would kind of, you know, that are kind of stereotypically associated with being a feminist. And then the question is, well, is it more likely that Linda is a banker or B, a banker and a feminist? And a lot of people pick option B, even though the probability calculus kind of tells you”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As he put it, a degree of logical weakness. So, you know, if I say that one theory is more likely than another theory, there is always this perfectly consistent interpretation where what I'm actually just saying is that if I said that this theory is more likely than that theory, I can say this theory says less than this theory. That was kind of the idea of it. And basically the reason therefore here I think kind of became skeptical of some of these probabilistic approaches to knowledge is simply the fact that as he saw it, and I think that there are some reasons to kind of think that this is in fact how people think is that what people actually want, what they believe in, what they seek are not kind of these sort of tautology-like contentless”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it sort of did, right? So the basic idea that Popper had that I think kind of came out, this theorem, I think, came out of kind of the same way of thinking about this, was basically just this idea that, so he was interested in the idea of logical content of a theory. There was this idea that just like you could have this probability measure that you assign to theories, you can assign a content measure. So the idea is that some theories say more than others. And the question was, can you construct a measure of that kind? And one of the interesting observations in thinking about that measure is simply the fact that kind of the constraints or the rules it has to obey are exactly the same as the probability calculus, basically. So in a certain sense, you can always interpret some assignment of probabilities as really being a kind of a statement of”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of sort of kind of trying to use Bayesian reasoning to either build an AGI or for various other purposes. And we thought that would be sort of a very interesting thing to present.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure. So we wrote a paper on something called the Popper Miller theorem. Now, there are sort of two, there was a lot of kind of subsequent commentary on this result. And the main points that people kind of made were, well, the main points of dispute were, well, in what sense is this proposition that they said was the inductive part? In what sense does it kind of capture all of this theory that goes beyond the evidence, as they put it? And then the other issue was just, you know, because there is this sort of vague notion of inductive support and what exactly that means. And so that was kind of another source of objections. And I think that the conversation has in many ways sort of moved on from there. But we sort of thought that that argument is sort of still interesting. We found sort of a couple of other ways of explaining it. And I think they present kind of a very interesting challenge to this idea.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really work as you know, you guys are imagining it because, for example, I mean, as Hume pointed out, this is kind of the famous problem of induction, there is no way to kind of proceed logically, i.e. by reason from experience to the celebrated general theories of the Enlightenment, such as Newton's theory and such like. So I do not know what opinion exactly I have on that issue, but these are some of my thoughts.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do with anything else, maybe it was just economic progress that allowed for all this thought to be produced at the time. It's very, very difficult to sort of figure out exactly how causality works with most of these things. But to this idea that it was due to a change in method, I mean, like, well, like a lot of people at the time had that idea, but a lot of people kind of subsequently criticized that idea by sort of pointing out, well, I don't know, maybe something did change in the way we thought about things, but nobody can really understand that change, right? Because a huge part of that idea was that was this idea of reason, really, that somehow or other reason is the way to understand the natural world. And what, for example, Hume and other skeptics subsequently pointed out is just that, well, like this can't possibly”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do not exactly have a view on that subject. For example, there, to be honest, I just sort of don't know. I kind of have various passing thoughts on that issue, but I mean, for example, there is this sort of question of narrative about the importance of the Enlightenment. And it's not exactly obvious if that narrative is in fact true. or if that narrative is more of a fiction. And there are strong proponents for one of that positions and there are strong proponents for the other. And what they have in common, ironically, is that I think that they both sort of agree that there was something very important about the Enlightenment because there is perhaps yet another third explanation where all of this had nothing to do with it.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, okay, I'm not sure if that is sort of paraphrasing it exactly as I see it, because it's very unclear if one is ever using a method. Because, you know, as I said at the beginning, people have been thinking about the natural world without being conscious of it in any way. And it is thoughts are constantly arising in the mind, right? And it often feels like a bit of a stretch to say that all these different thoughts one is having are arising as a result of a method as opposed to just arising. There is a certain level of ambiguity that I think sometimes occurs there.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The natural world than others. But I think that that is still like what patterns work, how one thinks about them and so on. All of these things are kind of more of a great mystery than an exact science, to put it like that.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would perhaps, funny, you mentioned Pauper there because I would actually dispute that premise. He wrote this, I mean, there is, I think, a very nice set of undergraduate lectures that has been recorded from him where he says that he was, I think, a professor of scientific method at the London School of Economics or something like that. And he says in that lecture that he is a professor of a subject that he thinks does not exist. But his student firearm, I think, actually wrote a book against method, which is sort of yet another kind of philosopher of science arguing against that idea. Now it is true that there are certain, I guess, patterns of thought that are more conducive to under, that seem to at least be more conducive to understand.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The current conception of this, therefore, as I said, sort of before, kind of allows you to make criticism of somebody. You can say, well, are they really doing this thing or not, which is not a thing you could really do where it just, where people just sort of thinking about specific issues and what they did was understood in that way. And in general, I do think that making conscious of what one is doing and kind of being and sort of classifying it or telling yourself the story about it is one thing that is known in several other fields to sometimes lead to problems. Hence the term self-consciousness and it being sort of productive, it being deemed counterproductive in many areas.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So one problem with this idea is that the idea of sort of science That one is somehow doing something more other than just being engaged with a particular problem or question and pursuing it wherever it might lead. There is this idea that there is a specific method that one ought to use to think about this particular question rather than just where sort of the question naturally leads you. And I think that this attitude or this idea can often stop people from doing sensible things that would otherwise that would help with sort of pursuing their problem, right? So the thing is that you need to pursue the various questions with a specific method as opposed to just where kind of the logic of the problem itself leads you. And I'm not saying that this actually affects everybody or that this is a sort of an across the board thing, but it is sort of an argument that often”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you can have an institution that supports that activity, but you don't need to understand it in this particular way that science is often understood.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of say okay, well, all of these people are engaged in this unified activity called science. And oh, are some of them really doing it or not, right? Everybody is just, it's just, you know, one person is doing this, one person is doing that. One person is doing the third thing. So perhaps, I mean, an interesting comparison might be for kind of the particular view that I have is just like, you know, like people have this idea of an entrepreneur, right? Well, you know, in a certain sense, and all of these entrepreneurs are kind of trying to construct different companies, right? But nobody is kind of asking the question, well, is any one of these people actually entrepreneuring, right? That is not a conversation that ever arises. So it is in that sense that I think that”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so perhaps to illustrate this, right? One needn't think of this activity in a unified way. So for example, imagine that we had an institution and in this institution there would be somebody who was interested in liquid helium and he would be writing about it and talking with all the people that were interested in it. And then you would have another person and that person would be interested in the way stars swarm and their evolution. And that person would be sort of again writing about this, talking with other people about it. And you could have so on for just a bunch of other things. Now, you can easily have an institution that would be sort of supporting all of these people in that endeavor. But, you know, but now, for example, if one were to just kind of stop there, right, it's not possible yet at that stage, you know.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there is an activity, i.e. trying to understand the natural world that seems to work better when it is supported sort of both kind of, that is institutionally and culturally supported. So, you know, it is useful to have institutions that kind of keep all the relevant books at the same place and kind of get some of the same people at the same place that sort of organize events and sort of where people can sort of meet each other. And I think that so I'm not disputing that there is an activity that is sort of worthy of being supported. But whether that sort of particular way of looking at that activity is the right one. Is less clear”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Special social role for that. Like all of that obviously has to develop. But it does seem to be the case that you can reach a better understanding of the natural world without it. And therefore, there is a question about whether it is actually helpful.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There has definitely been sort of names for this role. So one way to sort of think about it is that people have always thought about the natural world, though, right? So people have always tried to understand how machines work, how nature works, how sort of everything does. And they often did that without ever becoming conscious of the idea that they were doing anything special or that they are playing a special role by doing so. And they were able to sort of do it just fine. And one of the things that, you know, at some point that obviously changed this sort of idea that one is engaged in some sort of a special activity when one is trying to understand nature and there being kind of a”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's, and you know, people were able to do science before that quite well. And so one of the problems that I see, I guess, in that respect is just that people perhaps think about what is a scientist and, sorry, who is a scientist and what is science a bit too much.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so my view on that subject is that often a lot of talk about science ends up being quite counterproductive. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as science, but I definitely think that sort of that people identify with science too much, they wonder whether what they are doing is science. They think they are scientists and wonder what is it that they should do in their capacity as scientists. And I think that often has a counterproductive effect on basically what they do. Now, one interesting thing to note is that the name scientist is actually an early 19th century invention. It was traced back to, I think, two professors that I think Trinity College in Cambridge.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The newest post I have out is titled If Prediction Markets or Policies were Legal Based on Robin Hansen's idea of a future. In fact, I just interviewed him for a podcast, so expect that in the next week. Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Machaw's Leonardis. Machaws is covered in a paper with David Deutsch about the Palmer Miller theorem, and we get into that as well as the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of scientific progress, advice to young people who want to be polymaths. Machaz is one such, as you will see. He's a fascinating person that have had the pleasure of getting to know, and he has a broad range of interesting ideas which we get into. So without further ado, here's Machaw's Leonardis.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And welcome to the Lunar Society. Sword's been so long since the Tyler Count interview. I want to thank all of you for joining this podcast so early on. I especially want to thank those of you who have been sharing these episodes on Twitter and other platforms. Since this is a new podcast, almost all of the views and listens I get here are because of your retweets and endorsements, so please continue sharing this podcast if you enjoy it. I also want to thank those of you who have bought me books and equipment off my Amazon wish list. Scott Hamilton bought me the very microphone I'm recording off of. John Beaty donated Nassim Tayev's new book. Someone else donated Charles Murray's new book, and someone gifted me one hundred twenty dollars raspberry pie kit for embedded systems programming. If you're one of the people who anonymously donated, please DM or email me so I have a chance to thank you personally. And to Scott and John, I'm really grateful for your gift. I also want to let you know that I'll be writing daily at Dwarkesh. complete up there to receive my blog via email.”
2020-08-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source