Danny Jones Podcast - #17 - Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence | Nathan Crock

Episode Date: August 3, 2019

Nathan Crock is an expert in Computational Science with a focus in Machine Learning and Computational Neuroscience. Nathan joined the Koncrete podcast this week to discuss philosophical reasoning and how deductive arguments work, as well as the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nathan Crock, ladies and gentlemen, we are live on the podcast with the genius himself. Greetings, all the way from, all the way from, what planet did you come from today? Zorbon. Zorbon. How far is that? It's beyond human comprehension. Well, thank you for blessing us with your knowledge and your presence today. It's an honor.

I really enjoy chatting with you guys. I'm looking forward to whatever we end up discussing today. It's always fun. When we first discussed doing the podcast again, I think we wanted to talk about the basics of reasoning and forming arguments. Because these are things that are relevant to pretty much anybody, whether you're negotiating a business deal or you're arguing with your grandma. Yeah. What elements go into it? We probably should start a little deeper than that.

Let's do it. Yeah, let's get real deep. All right. So whenever you talk about forming an argument, you're essentially trying to convey. some sort of a truth or some sort of a fact. But the problem is that humans are subject to different stimuli that combine to give them their own internal opinion of what quote unquote truth is. Right.

And so this started way back in, you know, Greek, Aristotle, Plato. Basically, they have these, the three main things that influence people and what they decide is going to be true is their instincts and their primal sort of, you know, evolutionary inclination, survival, sex, food, shelter. safety. And then they're persuaded by emotions. They feel certain things and they determine their emotions to be connected with their human experience and what's more real than my experience that I'm having right now. I experience it, therefore it's real, right? And then there's rationality and reason and logic. So traditionally, ever since the old days back with Plato, Aristotle,

and Socrates, et cetera, reasoning at the top level, it was considered the way to go. And if you didn't use logic and rationality, you were, you were base, you were beneath everybody else. You were not a fully functioned human, if you will. You know, people have been a little more relaxed about that over the years, thankfully. But the majority of the field of philosophy is sort of built on that premise, right? So just learning how to form and construct arguments within this logical, rational framework. And the reason that I said, it's important that we go a little bit deeper is because if we start just, you know, at the rationality and the reason and the logic,

we're not going to get very far because most people don't reason like that nowadays. That's the academic way of doing it. That's what people in academic intellectual circles, you know. Their discussions and their debates are unlike anything you have at Thanksgiving or New Year's Eve when you and your grandma are just, you feel like your argument is more valid when you say it more loudly. Right. So that's sort of the foundation.

And then... is understanding that so important to somebody like you? How did you get so interested in understanding this and become such an expert in it? First off, I'm an expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence, so I wouldn't dare say I'm an expert in these things as I have found to be a very interesting hobby. And any sort of an intellectual person or an academic person, I think, has a responsibility to understand what it is that they consider to be true or truth if there is any such thing, which hopefully we might talk about.

So this is important to know when you're in science, basically? At least. At least. At the very minimum. I would think most scientists should have a healthy respect and understanding for the foundations of the scientific reason and how it fits into the fundamentals of just logic and epistemology, you know, metaphysics, these things, branches of philosophy that study the nature of reality, the nature of knowledge, and how we can go about even acquiring it. I mean, at the end of the day, like, let me ask you this.

Okay. prove to me that your soda there exists. It's sitting here. I can feel it, and I'm drinking it. Okay. So philosophically, you might say, well, when you say you're feeling it, what does that actually mean? So just describe it. With the touch, I can reach out, I can grab with my hand, and I can touch it,

and I feel the sensation of the chug-jug-cuzzi around the icy cold LeCroy. Okay. All right, so what you're trying to say then is that there's a, a physical object there because you perceive yourself as sensing it, right? Correct. But as we know, everything is composed of atoms, and atoms are almost completely empty space, and they have electrical charges around them. So what's actually happening is you're feeling like you're feeling it,

but there's no contact between matter. There's just a repulsion of electric charges. So you're not actually feeling it. You're feeling the result of something having been there, but you're not explicitly feeling it. right and then you can go into the same argument for vision well i can see it no you're seeing the result of something having been there a photon bounced off of it and then came and hit your retina and your retina interpreted the the wavelength of the photon as its color and everything so you're

not actually seeing it you're just seeing the result of something having been there okay okay all right so now this it all goes down into a rabbit hole of materialism versus immaterialism but we don't need to know all those all those details all we need to know is is the surface level of it. In general, right? So, but what it really comes down to is physicists and engineers, they acknowledge that this is a thing, and then they go, so, I don't need to prove that it's actually there. I can just measure the result of it having been there and I can do things with it and I can predictably get some outcome when I interfere with whatever's there. I can't tell you that something is there or what it is, but I know the result of it there. I can measure it and sense it,

etc. Right. Right. So this is what you're confronted with when you're supposed to be an intellectual person trying to find truth, right? Okay. At the fundamental level, if you want to even prove something exists, it's not as trivial as we immediately think it, as we take our intuitions for granted. And upon introspection and reflection, we find that these things that seem so obvious at first are, are much more complicated than we initially gave them credit for, which is, in my opinion, exciting. Okay, so where do we go from here? All right. So, sure. Well, I mean, You got my head spinning, Nathan. All right, cool.

So, all right, so this is important. So now we basically have a respect now for the importance of trying to understand how individual is determined what is allegedly true, right? Okay. And the reason this is important is because if you and I are sitting at the dinner table and, you know, the whole family is over there and then you got your girlfriend over here and you want to show off to your girlfriend how smart you are by dropping some intellectual little logic bombs and trying to argue with this other person and persuade them, if you are not aware of the mechanism that your fellow interlocutor is using and their ability to reason, and their ability to reason. then you are not going to be reasoning or convincing them within their framework. If you recall from the last time we had a discussion, I was saying that if I'm going to be saying words, I have a responsibility to communicate in a language and a modality that you understand.

Otherwise, why am I even talking? The same thing can be said about you trying to quote unquote persuade or share knowledge with somebody, right? If you don't understand the way with which they determine truth, then how can you give them evidence that something is true that you want to convince them of, right? So, for example, if you're a purely emotional person, and I come and I give you this super compelling,

logical argument that's infallible and just beautiful, beautiful, you're going to go, I don't care, I don't like it, because, because I can just feel like I don't like it. Right. Makes sense. Yeah, is that kind of the same when some people, when they think of something or some people, they have a stronger sense of touch or smell or vision.

So like when someone's trying to describe something, you know, an idea they have, like, oh, I see it happening this way or no, I feel this way about it. Yeah. Is that sort of similar to what you're talking about, how people absorb information, how people process different times of information? Yeah. So that's one piece. So you're basically talking about the sensory experience itself, right? And a lot of people, I think in particular George Berkeley, you might have, okay, so let's start with this. I got an idea.

So René Descartes, right? So he gave the whole Cogito Ergosum, I think, therefore I am. He was the quintessential skeptic who began the whole materialism versus immaterialism thing. And he's basically saying, I can't actually prove anything exists. I can't show that this thing is real. I get really uncomfortable when I try and find logical arguments about things that are based off of facts that I can't actually establish. So he basically gave the analogy like, look, I got a bucket of apples, and I know that in here there are some rotten apples. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to dump all the apples out

and then pick each one up and inspect it and only put the good ones back in. And the idea was he was getting rid of false facts about the world, but he had to systematically interrogate and inspect every single little element that he believed in. Right? And so when he did that, he was like, well, where can I start? What do I do? And so he basically decided that the only thing he can be certain of is true

is that he's thinking. That was his starting place. I think, therefore I am. And then from that, he then built this whole logical argument about how things are true. And there's lots of problems with them, for example. Okay. But then, a little bit later on, George Berkeley, I believe, he said, you know, I'm not so sure that this, I think, therefore I am, is sufficient enough, right? What I really can depend on is what I see and what I feel and what I touch my senses, my ability to perceive reality.

And so his was, what was it, S-A-S-Parcopi or something, which is basically, To be is to be perceived. I like that one. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody's around to hear, it did it make a sound, right? So it doesn't exist unless it was perceived. And so that's a really problematic way to go about things because then you should be afraid to go to sleep at night

because as soon as you're no longer perceiving your consciousness, then you just cease to exist, right? So that's obviously not true. But then he went and he fixed that by saying, well, God is the all-seeing, all-perceiving thing that keeps us existing. And so that was his whole approach, right? And so these things started building on each other, one after the other.

And the idea is always at the fundamental level, what is true? Like, how, if you believe something, you have a responsibility to ask yourself why you believe it. Of course, right. And so how do you justify or convince yourself to believe whatever it is that you believe? If someone else jumped over the river and, and landed on the grass. If I jump over the river and I clear the water, I'm going to land on the grass.

That's a really simple example. But here's the problem with that, right? So basically you're saying I've seen a white swan today, and then tomorrow I see another white swan, and the next day I see 10 white swans, and all I see is white swans, so then I draw the conclusion that there must be white swans, and that's all that there is, right?

Okay, yeah. But there are not only white swans, There are black swans. Or, for example, you know, you said this person jumped over the river and landed on grass, so you're going to do that. Well, so you basically had a sample size of one, and then you just drew a conclusion that that's going to be truth. Okay, well, what about if I'm walking through the ghetto over here and I get robbed by a black guy? Okay.

Does that mean that every black guy is now going to rob me? You see how that's a very dangerous line of reasoning to go to follow to its conclusion. Right. Right. So that can be the source of some of these saucy, you know, discrimination and racial topics is our inability to actually compute these. statistics that what seemed obvious to you a moment ago has now been demonstrated to lead to a rather troubling conclusion, right? Okay, okay. What someone thinks is true has to rely on premises. Very good. Right? Yes. What we would consider evidence. Premises are mostly used and you're trying

to construct an argument, right? And so that's good, but the premises themselves are often assumed to be true. They are held without proof. So could that also be a, could a premise also be a bias? That, uh, or no, no. Bias is, it has a slightly different definition. Okay. Though under many circumstances, you can sort of interpret them that way. It's your prior, your bias, your disposition to something a prior before, before experiencing

or before being presented with, with new data. Okay. Yeah. So a premise, a premise can be completely falsified. because of a bias. Yeah, it's great. So now, okay, so first we talked about basically the foundation of how people decide what's true or not. Now you're trying to talk about how we form arguments. Well, yeah, so basically there's many types of arguments and the most obvious one to start with that's really clear for a lot of people is the deductive arguments, right? So all, this is the classic one from all textbooks.

All humans are mortal. Danny is a human, therefore Danny is mortal. Right. So that would be a deductive argument where the two premises are, all humans are mortal and Danny is a human. And so those two premises imply that the conclusion is true. Right, right, right. But I could say something like all humans have tails. Danny is a human, therefore Danny has a tail. So I laid out two premises into conclusion.

The argument itself is valid because everything is logical. One implies the other. But the conclusion's false because you clearly don't have a tale, and the reason that it's false is because one of the premises wasn't true. Okay. You see what I mean? Yeah. So this is why I can get kind of hairy. So when I'm here at the dinner table and I'm trying to say,

oh, well, you know, all the unions, they're doing this, and then darn Republicans doing this, and then they draw some sort of a conclusion about how conservatism is ruining the world or something. They're based on all of these premises, which are super loaded, and you could have an entire evening just discussing a few of these premises and trying to iron out all the idiosyncrasies that give them, veracity, right? Right.

What's interesting to me is the, all the different, understanding all the different types of biases people can have. When you're a little kid and you grow up and your parents always told you something was one way. And when they come into an argument, they assume that that premise or something is some way, specifically because that's all they know.

It's almost impossible to have a constructive argument or a discussion with them when their premises, there's no way you can convince them. them that they're completely wrong. All right. So you're touching on what I would consider to be one of the most important parts that I was hoping to eventually get to. Right. So we start with understanding that everybody has a different reason for forming their own truths. And then you say, well, once you have this mechanism for reasoning, then there's this approach, this technique for

forming arguments. And then the question finally becomes why? Right. So if I'm going to have a discussion with somebody else and the question is, why are you and I even discussing in the first place, right? And the answer to this, we're going to get back to the which you just said. Okay. So if we're discussing something, usually in a very heated and insulting way with many four-letter words,

which happens far too often, it's because there's something that's important to both of us and our alleged solutions to this thing differ. Donald Trump needs to be impeached. Donald Trump is doing a great job in fixing America. Right. So here we are.

We now disagree, although I'm being hypothetical. I hope it's academically rigorous and respectful to try and consider the other person's perspective as best as possible before you start trying to tear it down, right? So here we are and we disagree with each other. Okay.

So the question is, are you trying to convince me of your perspective? Is that what we're doing right now? I want you to agree with me. Right. Okay. And I'm going to do the same thing, right? But not everyone. Some people just want to fight. That's true. There are those people watching the world burn can feel good joker, for example, right?

Let's assume that we have the sociopaths, out of the room and they don't just want to watch the world burn. Okay. But yes, that's true. So then the question, the logical conclusion from this is, you are this person that you just said who has a firmly held belief and intuition that they found from their parents or from some experience in being raised. I, too, was raised in a different environment, different statistics.

I was exposed to different data and I have an equally firmly held belief, but different than yours. Right. I'm trying to convince you of mine and you're trying to convince me of yours. Right. What do you think is going to happen? It's going to get ugly. We're just going to, we're not even going to communicate.

We're just going to yell arguments at one another, and I'm not interested in your perspective. My job is to convince you of my perspective, right? But you're not interested in my perspective. You just want to convince me of your perspective. So you see how this is doomed to fail, like from the onset. Right. So when you go into a discussion with somebody and you have the idea that I want to win this discussion,

you've already failed. That's not what discussions are. for true intellectually responsible of what they're called interlocutors people who are you know the interlocutor interlocutors yes these are people who engage in philosophical debate they're not interested in winning winning isn't a thing they are interested in finding a deeper truth about the world so if i come to you and i give you this awesome argument that i'm super convinced is great and then you go hmm it turns out that you made some fallacious conclusion in your third you know inductive argument or something i should be great

grateful for that. Yeah, a lot of people go into those looking for a fight rather than looking for an opportunity. Like, they're looking for, you should look at it as an opportunity to share your ideas or to learn from them. But a lot of people look at it as going into a conflict or going into a battle. They do. And I would say it's even more than looking at it as an opportunity to share because that's the selfish perspective again. I want to tell you what I'm thinking. More precisely it should be, I am excited to have the opportunity to refine my ideas.

Only if I am willing to admit that my ideas are... Sharpen your blade. Yeah, only if I'm willing to let go of my convictions. Only if I'm willing to admit that I'm wrong, does holding on to the idea even mean anything. For example, if I'm talking with a historical case, it could be saucy for some, but particularly religious people who hold their convictions unfalsifiably and they're unwilling to relent. And I usually ask a simple question that lets me know their disposition, I say,

what would you need to experience or be presented with to change your mind, to stop believing, right? And then as soon as they go, nothing, then you know that they've forfeited their faculty of logic and reason, and they're not. Okay. They're basically just holding their conviction unfalsifiably, right? Right.

You just agree to disagree. Oftentimes that's sort of the best you can do in those cases. because, all right, so the idea for me, though, is that when I go into a discussion, well, I want to finish that conclusion, right? So this person holds their conviction and their idea just unfalsifiably, like they're never going to let this thing go. Right. That conviction is equally as meaningful as me saying, I believe I have unicorns in my stomach.

Right, right. And the reason is, is because neither of us are willing to let it go, which means it isn't really worth it. It isn't worth anything. It has no meaning. Like, there's no substance behind it. it only when I have a conviction that I'm willing to let go that I've tried to prove wrong over and over and over again and throughout the past three years I had been like consistently trying to

prove my ideas wrong and I just can't prove them wrong then it starts to mean something and that is the spirit of the scientific method right people like the old-fashioned psychologist Freud he was doing what was called pseudoscience right so essentially he would basically look at things from the past and justify them with things from the future. He could make every girl's problem turn into a source of penis envy or every man was in love with his mom, right? And he would just use some psychological and conversational magic to basically justify everything. Right. That is not how science works. Science is exactly the opposite, actually. Rather than justifying past observations with my current perspective or opinion,

and I'm going to make a prediction about the future that tries to disprove my current held belief, my current theorem. Okay. So, for example, if I let this go, what's going to happen? It's going to drop and smash on the table. Right, exactly, right? And the reason that you believe that

is because people have been trying to disprove that since Newton, and nobody has been able to disprove it. Right. Therefore, we have a justified, our belief that it is going to fall has been justified because nobody's been able to disprove it. Right. But when you go into an argument,

again and you have this firmly held belief that you're not willing to let go, that belief doesn't really have much substance because you haven't spent years actually like honing it and sharpening it and proving that it's true. Not only that, but you've stopped growing. If you are not willing to adapt your ideas and expand and try and find something more consistent with reality, then you're stunted, right? The other person who's really interested in, if you prove the other person wrong and they go, oh, thanks, that was great. They just grew and became better. and they now have a deeper truth about the world and you're stuck just being believing in whatever you believe

for no reason because you're not willing to admit that it could be wrong and refine your ideas. Right. All right, so here we go. I'm going to argue on the opposite side of discrimination and try to convince you that it's okay. All right, so I'm going to take the hard side first. So, all right.

Let's say that Rosie and Bob, they own a cake shop, okay? And a group of people come in and they ask Rosie. and Bob to make them a cake about some Nazi extremist celebration that they're about to have when they bring all the white supremacists together. And Rosie and Bob say, no, I don't want to do that. I disagree with that. You and many might say, well, good. They should not do that because they shouldn't support that kind of a thing. Right. Fine. But then again, the very next day, some two men might come in and ask Rosie and Bob to, bake a cake about homosexuality for their wedding, right? And at the same time, Rosie and Bob go,

no, I don't want to bake you that cake because I disagree in it. I disagree with that. So what's happened is in that second analogy, you might have gotten a little more upset about that. You're like, well, that's not right. They shouldn't have done that. Right. What what you did is you condoned discrimination the first time, and then you said it's not okay to discriminate the second time. So clearly it's not as obvious as saying discrimination is just wrong. There are clearly certain circumstances with which discrimination is okay and it's not as obvious as we think. Well, I mean, it's a free country and they own their own private business and they're allowed to make their own rules within their own private business as long as they don't

break the law. Is that right? Right. But what if their rules are imposing on the freedoms of others? Well, they're free to go down the street and go to another cake store and get another cake made. But what if the entire community feels the same way that? that those people do because of their collective beliefs.

And now there's a subsection of the society that has been ostracized because nobody's giving them the opportunity. Do you have any moral or ethical obligation to do something to help? Or is that just tough luck? I really, there's nothing I could argue. I can't put myself in the shoes of those people. God damn it, Nathan, this is hard. I think that's really kind of the important part here,

is that people take for granted their convictions and they argue from a very limited understanding of the depths and the complexities of these things that they think are so much more simple than they actually are. Discrimination is clearly wrong. Clearly not. I mean, it's not clearly blatantly wrong. It may be wrong sometimes,

and it may be justified other times. Right. So, yeah, for example, what... If you see a lion walking down the street, greet and I say, or behind me, for example, wherever there, wherever one may be, and then you say, oh, I'm going to go pet it. And I go, no, no, don't go pet it. It's going to bite. It's going to bite you. And you go, look, don't generalize, not all lions bite, okay? What you just did is you made a statistical generalization, which was based off of facts and observations that you've

made. Yeah. So one might say that under certain circumstances, statistical generalizations can be useful and beneficial and other times they may be detrimental and troublesome and so the real responsibility that i think people have is identifying what that threshold is where is it suddenly not okay anymore and the beautiful thing about this is that line is different for absolutely everyone and that's okay that's really important that we understand that because everybody has their own intrinsic subjective value system that we talked about earlier is based off of one of these three things and everybody's just different. There's no truth behind which one of those are better.

It's just fundamentally subjective. And so I think it's really important, you know, as we talk about these things, that the viewers are seeing that maybe these things that I held very strongly and firmly aren't quite as obvious as I thought they were before. All right, here, let's keep trying a few more. So do you think that everybody should be paid the same?

Generally, no. I mean, if somebody, is better at something or if something's been doing something for a longer amount of time, they should make more money. But what if a certain part of the society has been disenfranchised for so long that they don't really have an opportunity to acquire the skills necessary, to be competitive to then actually get that pay? What do you do then?

All right, well, this is just a simple intellectual experiment to demonstrate how the things that we think are solutions are clearly not, right? So this was presented at some economics conference, and I remember this argument, and I was pretty compelled. Okay, okay. All right, but essentially people are like, okay, well, we should force everyone to pay all races the same for the same kind of a job, right? So you have to make sure that they make at least the same rate. That seems super fair.

It seems super fair, right, at the high level. But the reality is that there's racist people out there. Right. Right. So making the racist people pay everybody equally doesn't make their racism go away. And then you go, oh, well, what it should do is. is at least just fix the symptoms of it. And it turns out that it doesn't.

Makes it worse, probably. And here's why. Here's the analogy that they gave, which might be kind of crass, depending on how you look at it, but I found it relatively insightful. Let's say you go to the grocery store, and T-Bone steak is $12 a pound,

and Chuck steak is $2 a pound. Which one are you going to buy? Personally, I'm going to buy the T-Bone. Okay. T-Bone's $50 a pound, and Chuck steak is $5 a pound. Which one are you going to buy? Still the T-bone.

Damn it, Danny. It's $100 a pound. Fine, I'll take the $5 chuck steak. Of course you will. All right. So the point is that there was some point at which the chuck steak became reasonable to you. Now, let's assume that for whatever reason you go there and the chuck steak is $100 a pound and the T-bone is $100 a pound. Which one are you going to buy?

Definitely the T-bone. Okay. So this is a crass analogy, of course, but there are people who perceive the difference between race to be the equivalent to a T-bone versus a Chuck St. stake. And if you force everybody to pay them all the same, then these people who are already racist, they're like, well, I mean, if I have to pay them exactly the same thing that I would have had to pay a white person, then I'm just going to

hire all white people. Right. Makes sense. So clearly, the rule or the law that they have to pay everyone the same in and of itself is insufficient. You also need to then enforce that they have to actually hire that many people as well to combat that

racist tendency that might actually happen. So the thing that you think, you know, everybody gets paid the same, that's fair. Well, it has really unintended consequences when you take some time to really analyze what takes place. Yeah. All right. And so these things, in my opinion, just demonstrate further

how once you're convinced of your ideas, you're already wrong, and just stop being super convinced in your ideas because there are so many things that you don't really understand. And I think if everybody had more humility and more openness to other people's perspectives and more interest in learning the truth than in being right, then these things would solve themselves. Because as we talked about earlier,

when you and I are here and I want to be right and you want to be right, we're just going to have a shouting match all day and we're not going to get anywhere. But if we're both more interested in finding truth than we are in convincing one or the other of our emotional perspectives, then we'll actually make progress and we'll be able to find some sort of a common ground, which is the only way that two,

people with differing views are going to find a solution that appeases both sides, that's sort of a solution intrinsically requires compromise, because clearly this person wants this thing and they want this thing, and you can't have both of these things at the same time. So the only way to get any sort of a solution is something that gets a little bit of both and misses something of others. But nobody's willing to make compromises because this is America, and we're all entitled in the American dream, and we should all get our way, right? One thing that sticks out to me in that, when you make that point, is the article that you sent me. Can we talk about that? Sure.

So the article you sent me was basically about a bunch of the Democratic presidential candidates. Correct me if I'm wrong. And the person writing the article was saying that those people, their policies were center in the United States. Of the political landscape. Of the political, right. Right. Right. Yeah.

I mean, the general argument was exactly that. Like, America's polarized, but these three people should be considered centrists. And the reason are is because... And who were the people? You remember? It was Bernie Sanders? AOC and Warren, I think. Okay, okay.

And they say these people, their ideas and political positions are centrist because they are consistent with most Americans. Okay, so that's a terrible argument because... Right, right, right. I can already see how that's, yeah. Right, so, I mean, that's reminiscent of geocentrism, right? So the Earth is the center of the universe and you just define that to be the center because that's where you are. That's where we are. Sure.

I mean, if you have liberals over here and conservatives over here and then you get a nice bell, there's a whole bunch of liberals and then there's a few conservatives and then a whole bunch of, a few centrists and then a whole bunch of conservatives, yeah, this bell might be larger than this one over here, but the center's still in the middle. You can't just redefine the center to suddenly be where you are. That's not how that works, right? Right. But the problem is that people were just like reposting this all over because they didn't really care whether it was true or not.

They just liked the idea that their ideas. It made them feel good. Yeah. Everyone likes to feel good. And what did you think about my argument to that, or not my argument, but basically you said that there was two bells, right? There was a huge bell on the conservative side and a huge bell on the liberal side. And it dipped down in the middle in the center.

And I thought that it could technically be just one big arc, right? Because there's less people on the very far left and the extreme far, you know, on the extreme of each side, there's less. people. Yes. So I thought that it could be possible that maybe the center is the highest point of the arc because maybe some of those policies do collide and there is some overlap there. Okay, so two things.

One is I would entertain that discussion and we can have it. But the premise from that person was that the American population is polarized. Okay. Polarization almost necessitates that there's a dip in the middle where you've been polarized. There's binaries, one and then the other. So the majority of Americans have differing opinions, right? So that was their premise. Okay, I see.

And as of right now, nobody knows exactly what that bell looks like, or what that distribution looks like, but I would suspect that if it's not really small, like I used in my naive example, I would expect to see a dip in the middle. Okay. I do believe that social media and the ability for people to reaffirm their convictions with less and less information

and to be more and more certain, about their ideas that are less and less found in reality is just enforcing people to be more and more polarized and less open to the other perspectives. Right. Now, what exactly that looks like? I don't know. Maybe you could come up like a bell and there's just like a little dip in the middle, you know, I don't know. But yes, I agree with obviously the idea that there's few people at the extremes.

But even if the bell did look like that, right, which assume it's just a nice, simple, happy Gaussian. and if AOC and Warren and Bernie Sanders are extreme liberals, as they say, that still doesn't define the center to be over there. The center is still in the middle. Right. Yeah, that's funny. When you talk about social media, it seems like, do you think social media has made it more polarized in the country

because of like the Facebook AI only putting people in the left in their own echo chamber and people in the right in their own echo chamber? Yeah, it's a double-edged sword, right? because, you know, the advertising engine, the AI engine, is essentially just trying to present you with things that you want, basically. That's all its goal is. Things that you're going to click on, things that you like. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, I never thought about it because Facebook basically is a giant advertising machine. So, yeah, you want to, well, the funny thing is this is they know what everybody wants. They know who you are down to your sperm count, basically. So they can target you with whatever they want. So it's interesting that... I don't know if they know us quite that well, but it's true that they know probably more than we would be comfortable with. But it's not like if you went and looked at Jeep or something

and then you go to Facebook and then suddenly you get advertisements for jeeps or something. It's like, oh my gosh, it's like reading my mind and I understand what's going. That's not what's going on. It's just simply observing your behavior and things that you might or might not like and then just trying to present things to you that are consistent with the things. is that you normally do. Right, right. You know, it isn't,

it isn't super, super terrifying in that regard. In fact, I personally kind of appreciate it. I hate really boring, obnoxious ads that have not, like, like,

tampons or something. Like, that's not me, bro. Like, you know, we got this thing going on, and I'm not a part of that. And another thing with social media is that,

um, is communication. People on social media, if you go to the comment section anywhere, YouTube, Facebook. Super respectful there. Twitter.

They're really respectful. I love that. And they're very vulnerable. They're not 10 foot tall and bulletproof. Yeah, they all want to find truth and they don't want to convince you of their ideas. Exactly. It's encouraging. So how is that going to fuck with people in the long run?

Exactly this problem we have now. Right. So when people, like, if you read the comments on most YouTube videos, it's just a cesspool of people of spewing hatred, basically. And those people could never do that in reality. They could never walk down the street or go to Publix and talk to somebody like that. and when the line gets blurred between reality and technology, what's going to happen with communication? So, as you know, I am a big fan of communication,

and I really appreciate all of those things, but we have to sort of put this into the big perspective, right? So our ability to communicate and interact with others has been finally honed over hundreds and thousands of years in Earth on this planet and subjected to the environment and the climate and the animals, this situation that we're in, right? So, for example, you know, maybe I'm young and I'm growing up and I'm like experimenting with social interactions and I go, Danny, you're fat. And then, and then you go,

and you make like a sad face. And then I'm like, oh, that doesn't feel good inside. I don't, I don't like that. I just made you feel that way, right? And then you start learning and hopefully, if you're a well-functioning human. And you start like learning what, you know, what works, what's good, what doesn't work in society. And you, you know, you know, what works, what's good, what doesn't work in society. You get the feedback from the person that you're communicating with. That's how communication evolved, right? And the problem is, is that with technology advancing at the rate that it is, our ability to communicate sort of biologically and evolutionarily, if you will,

hasn't been able to keep up with the rate that technology has been increasing. So we're all communicating at this new level, at this paradigm, that we weren't developed, if you will, or we didn't come about to be able to harness or access to its full potential. And yeah, it's got a lot of problems. And you're speaking about one particular one, which in my opinion is one of the worst ones.

But we need to take this individual responsibility to be more interested in truth than just feeling good and finding our own ideas and hearing more about our own ideas. We need to say, rather than just finding things that reaffirm my idea, I'm going to consistently try and prove my ideas wrong so that I know they're more true.

Like the more you can't prove your ideas wrong, the better they are. But that's hard to do. That's hard. It's not easy to do that. It's not an easy way to think. It's not at all. So how do you convince people to think that way? Lead by example.

I mean, you know, it was kind of my hope when I was just thinking about this that maybe for whatever reason we'd stumble upon something that we disagreed about. And then through just an open, respectful discourse, one of us might be able to find a deeper truth and then just sort of admit it. and then to be like, wow, that was awesome. All right. Education. Oh, shit. All right.

Ooh, I just cursed on the internet. Oh, man. We're live too. I can't take that back. So what do you think about what's your stance on education? If I want to grow up, my kid, I'm about to have a kid any minute now, and he's going to grow up. And my, let's go back. My parents always force it down my throat that I had to go to college.

and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and that's how I would develop a career and make money and live the American dream. Because they shoved it down my throat so hard, it made me rebel and not want to do it. For some instinctual, some weird reason, I always wanted to do the opposite of what they told me or whatever they thought was true. What they thought was right, I always want to do the opposite.

So I don't know if that's true with everybody, but it made me not want to go to college. Long story short, I did end up going to like a community college for a year and a half and I dropped out. So if you think college is the right thing, my first argument would be look at some of the most successful, happiest people on the planet. And they didn't go to college.

They were self-taught in what they did. And not all, but a lot. You're talking about entrepreneurs. They were self-taught, extremely passionate about what they did, whether it was art, whether it was business, whether it was doing shit like this, like podcasts, or making movies. They just found their own way and forged their own path

to doing what they wanted to do, whether it be sneaking into the industry and working for free or like Spielberg's sneaking onto a movie set and just pretended like he worked there, pretended like he's been there the whole time and just keep doing it and keep learning and keep meeting new people and working his way up to being one of the most successful people in that field. All right. Let's pause.

Daniel is a lot of wrong with your arguments there. Okay. So firstly, you started off with the description about your family and the things that your family were telling you about education, which is... It might be irrelevant, right. It is completely irrelevant to an argument about education, although I care about your family. I'm interested to know what's important to you, but as someone trying to share logical arguments, if you're trying to say something towards for or against education, that wasn't a relevant point. but an interesting precursor, if you will.

Secondly, your argument about the well-being of humans and their livelihood with or without education still isn't actually an argument for or against education in and of itself. Wait, wait, wait. Say that one more time. So the livelihood of a human being in their happiness, being independent of education, isn't really an argument either for or against education in and of itself. I mean, what you might be having an argument more about

is sort of the structure of... society or the societal society's perspective on education perhaps is it seems like what you have more of an issue with rather than education in and of itself or do you have a problem with the institution of education where maybe the ideology behind what college should be isn't what's actually happening I also have a problem with that great so we could have an argument aimed at some of those points perhaps well what are we having an argument I education you brought it up in general education I think I think the problem is is it lines the bank's money with pocket for people going into debt to get student loans to waste four years of their lives just to come out of college and not be able to get a job

in what they supposedly spent four years doing. And that's what I see with a majority of the people I'm around and meet every day. That's one part of it with the institution. I think it's fucked for lack of a better term. That's the academic term. Yeah, that's the academic term. So I guess we've got to get back to what is the actual argument, right? Your contention is with the institution itself.

You think that education has an objective and it is not accomplishing it. And if I think about it, I kind of use that, I kind of do use that examples of people who have achieved massive success without college as kind of a reinforcing. premise to that. A couple of things to just keep in mind. Although I don't know your experience, people frequently do that all the time. They're like, well, look at Bill Gates. Right, exactly.

Yeah, I clearly don't need to go to high school or college, right? Right, right. So the problem there is you have a sample size of one. Okay. And there's hundreds and millions of people. Right. And so you can't draw a conclusion about everybody on average with a sample size of one. Okay.

Okay, so that's just not good statistics in general. Right. Secondly, I would say to you, I'm not sure how many of these people that you've been looking at about their livelihood and happiness and well-being, but just make sure that you're also doing some quick statistical analysis behind. You're not doing what's called, is one of the biases that you were talking about, confirmation bias. Confirmation bias. Where you're just looking for things that reaffirm your own ideas already. Because you can be honest with yourself, how many people out there are actually miserable without education. I'm not saying that there are some or are not some.

I'm just saying make sure that you weigh both sides of this when you're coming to your conclusion. And then the second part is essentially about the institution itself. So, yeah, I completely agree with you. I hate it. It's a pain in the ass. However, however, so it's totally true that the institution has been sort of flipped around to where people have to pay too much for skills that aren't very useful. But there's more to it than just that. It isn't only a fault of the education.

It's actually a fault of the society. in my opinion. I agree. As an educator who's taught classes and universities and been in front of people, the students come into the classroom with this position that it's my responsibility that they learn. Right. And so they just sort of like sit there and they're like, okay, cram knowledge in my brain. I don't want to be here, but this is where I'm supposed to be.

So now make it worth my time. And the problem is that that entitled perspective. Yeah. It's just not at all how knowledge works. You can't learn something by just osmosis, right? You learn by doing, right? You need to actually go home and do homework. You need to do the problems.

My job is not to make you learn. My job is to facilitate your journey through learning and advise you and guide you to not make the pitfalls and the mistakes that other people made. But it's an individual journey, and you have an individual responsibility to want to learn. You've got to be hungry for knowledge. You've got to read these books.

You've got to be interested in figuring these problems out. And if you're not, then don't go to college. It's not the people's responsibility to motivate you. That's not what college is for. College is a place for education, not a motivational institution. Okay. Why are these entitled kids there? Well, because that's the American culture, right?

So if you think like a really long- Their parents told them they gave them an ultimatum. You have to go to college. But it's not their fault entirely, right? Look at the structure of America. Over the years, that was how it worked, right? Before the advent of the internet, if you went up to a job and you said, you should hire me, they're going to go, why?

And you go, because here's a piece of paper that says that I did these things for four years, which means that I am certified to do these things for you, right? Right, right. But nowadays, with the advent of the internet, just a Danny Jones can just start making YouTube videos and showing his skills without any sort of formal education. And people are like, I don't care what your education is. You can clearly already do what I want you.

You can already do what I need you to do. So you're hired. Same thing with coding and programming. programming. Google hires people straight out of high school. They don't care if you have an education. If you can do it, then they need you to do it. That's how the industry works, right? College is essentially like an institution for higher learning. It is the pursuit of advancing the frontier of human knowledge. That's what it was initially designed to be. It was like an academic institution where people came together to just philosophize about the things that just make humans break into the future. Teleportation, these big dreaming things, right? And it slowly turned down like this job factory where you can't get a job without a piece of paper. And then the parents from, you know, the 50s, 60, 70s, that was what they were raised with and what they thought. So then they start pounding that down the throats of their children.

But suddenly the society and the culture has been changing such that these things aren't really useful anymore. A, because technology's changed things. And two, because the culture of the students themselves is changing such that the standards in the universities have to keep dropping or also all the students will just keep failing because they're not really trying as much anymore. and in general there are some really great students and I'm encouraged by a lot of them and they're they make teaching worth it for me completely yeah but yeah so there's there's a lot of problems there but it's it's deep right so your initial qualm if I recall was essentially that the institution itself is making the American economic situation just worse basically the next generation

of people are going to come out with debt and no skills that are marketable or valuable right Right, exactly. And then somebody wants to like point fingers and say whose fault is it? Or we can say, how can we fix it? We make education free so they're not in debt. Well, that's not going to help if there's not getting any value from the education because the standards are too low. Or, you know, there's all kinds of possible explanations or solutions, each with pros and cons. And those pros and cons are determined by your internal value system and everybody's got different ones, right?

So what do you think about free education? Or making like a universal education like a certain, like a certain, where it's a certain level you can get for free? in the country. That's a good one. That is one which I am probably most uncertain on, right? Okay. Because most of what I believe that I know from reading observation and the studies that I've learned from economics is people value what they pay for, and that value makes other people want to make it more valuable by increasing its quality. And this is just a virtuous circle where the things that people pay for get better and improved because people want money so that they can live and do their things that they want so they make things more valuable that people are willing

to pay more for and so on and so forth. So the quality of education can be influenced very strongly by how much resources or utility goes into the system itself. But then again we have a sort of a cultural responsibility to ensure that people get educated and what if you don't have a lot of money, Right. So then what do we do about them? Well, you say, well, too bad. Maybe you might say that. Well, the problem with that is now what are they going to do? They're just going to become a drain on society and doing food stamps and being homeless. And then you're going to complain about homeless people and people taking food stamps. But they're only that way because they couldn't get ice as education. You see what I mean? It's not again. It's not as simple as people think it is. Right. And if you want to learn anything, you can go on the internet. I mean, to an extent and learn it more than to an extent. It's baffling, man. I mean, I learned how to, I fucking put it a show. shoulder back into place this weekend by looking up a YouTube video. Dude, so my advisor and I, you know, we talk about this frequently. We believe... I became a doctor this weekend.

Sorry to interrupt. No, you pretty much can. Like, there's an entire neuroscience course from Duke University, from this awesome professor, something white, and he's just got hours and hours of videos of him just like cutting open brains and explaining to you just everything you need to know about the human brain. Basically, the entire first year of medical school, you can just. just sit at home and just watch for the hell of it, right? I mean, heck, are you kidding me?

Right, so anyone who wants it can get it. Yeah, exactly. Why aren't more people getting it, Danny? For free. Why aren't more people getting it, Danny? That's a good question, because you have to have that piece of paper. If you want to go operate on somebody, you have to have that. How many years do you need to do that, to be a neurosurgeon?

Yeah. That's true for neurosurgery in particular, though we, that's a separate argument because I personally would be pretty happy that whoever's cutting my brain open has, you know, jump through their hoops. You too, baby. I got this. But what about, you know, fixing phones, for example? Right.

How do you get certified to do that? You don't, do you? Can you? I don't know. That's a question for Rofal. Rofal. I do YouTube videos. Right?

He teaches, he fixes phones, and he makes YouTube videos on how to do it. And people can watch. Well, where did you learn how to do it? Yeah, super good, right? And then he just makes the video so other people see that he can do it. Right. And then he reads resources and learns more about it. Well, I mean, you do require skills that aren't necessarily trivial or easy to obtain to do it, right?

You've got to learn some basics and programming, basic hardware, some basic soldering stuff. Yeah. See, so what about? Plus you got expensive equipment and two, you got to pay for, right? No? Oh, okay. Yeah. And here's the thing, Internet.

Go find a course on Coursera or EdX or Udeme or any one of Julia or whatever, any one of the million websites that give you free courses and find one about mobile phones. And I promise you, I don't promise you, but I bet you, probabilistically speaking, five bucks that you'll find one. Email me if you can't find it. Five bucks. So seriously, I mean, it's out there. So the question is that you said, why aren't more people doing it?

And it's the same reason that they're not trying in the classroom. When I'm up there, like, doing a song and dance, just trying to get them excited, doing backflips off of desks. Like, hey, love mathematics. Check out this integral. How cool is this? I want to go to the club on Thursday and see that cute boy. Yeah.

That's fine, but can you just learn some math first? But another thing about the internet and technology and learning is like, just like these podcasts have blown up. And there's a podcast about every single niche. So you can find this and literally find dozens and dozens of episodes of hour long conversations like this about anything. And it's become hard to navigate to. because, I mean, a lot of stuff's free. Like, this is free.

Obviously, people need to pay to watch this. But there's a lot of people online who quote themselves as gurus in certain fields or certain subjects. And they will pay you. And they'll charge you for their content. So it's become harder to navigate to find the kind of content that you can trust to learn from. That's super true. Because a lot is flawed. Yeah, as they say, half of knowledge is knowing where to find it.

Yeah. Oh, I like that. Half of knowledge is knowing where to find it. I'll tell you, I can't tell you how often when I'm doing my research at my desk, I flip around and I've got a bookshelf full of dozens of textbooks, like stupid textbooks that I've worked through over the years. And I don't remember exactly the formula for whatever, the Lagrange interpolation or whatever thing that I need off at the top of my head.

But I know where it's at, and I know how it works, and I know what it's used for. So when I'm doing research and then suddenly I'm like, oh, I need to do this to find that old. if I can interpolate through these points. Okay, how do it? Oh, my numerical analysis book, I get it, I flip it out, I find it, program up the algorithm, and I'm done, and I can move on, right?

But the point there is, as you were saying, is there's so many textbooks out there. You can go on Amazon, there's just hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Which ones should you use? And maybe that is an argument for some form of a formal education. Just to meet the people who can guide you enough. But see, that's not really a formal education. That's just mentorship, which is something that I strongly agree with.

And even at Newsai, the company that we have in Newsai Labs, most of the people who come in to Newside Labs, they're interns, and they don't even have, these are some of like the best students at FSU. You know, I take only the best of the best, like straight A students. I ask them like hard math questions or interview questions before they even come in, and they still don't know anything even remotely close to get started with machine learning because it requires demanding a knowledge of probability theory, mathematics, programming, data engineering, and backend cloud server side stuff.

stuff, where do you get that in a university setting? You don't. You take biology and chemistry and mathematics. Right. So the question is, where do you acquire the useful skills, right? And so for me, this internship opportunity was for me to get these students in here who have potential, who work hard, who want to learn, and then I know where they can find the resources because I've done it and I do it.

And so while they're there working with me, I go, okay, well, you're trying to solve this problem, well, to solve this, work through this tutorial, and then come back and I'm going to and grill you to make sure that you've learned this. And then once you know, we'll work on it together to demonstrate that they've got the hard work. Rather than the students who come in and go teach me to learn, I want to know that. I want to know that they are hungry for knowledge, that they're going to read and learn what I tell them to read and learn. That is how that mentorship, apprenticeship, like education cycle should be structured, in my opinion, because that's what works for us. And they find it very valuable.

And do you only take interns from the college, like students of the college as interns? Or could you take anybody? I'll take anybody. If I walked in there and wanted to be your intern, would you do it? I'll take anybody. Yeah, I mean, I have basic criteria. I ask like a couple of questions. I mean, honestly, the main criteria that I have for people that I accept is I just need to know that they want to learn.

They have an open mind and they're creative. Everything else, I can more or less teach you. I can give you the resources necessary to do it. And as long as you're working hard on your own reading and going through the material, we'll get where we need to go. But the thing that you need is the desire to find that truth, just like when it comes to arguing and discussing. If I'm more interested in you giving me the knowledge or me just telling you what I think, rather than just like a genuine intellectual honesty, like let's just find out what the truth is. Your feelings, my feelings, who cares, bro?

Let's just learn. Once we get there, we'll start making some progress. So my fiance and I were just talking on the way here, actually. She watched some movie about gender issues, right? About transgender, this guy wanted to be a woman, and then he went and got the surgery. And it was like how it works. and going through this whole thing. And then she and now were just like going back and forth

about the pros and the cons and whether it's good, whether it's bad and how people think about it. And then in the end, we ended up sort of agreeing that the only way it's going to get better is when people are just more interested in understanding how things work rather than just sort of espousing their ideas. And we're like, well, you know, we can either fix that problem like fix racism

or just fix its symptoms. And we're like, well, you can't just fix racism. So let's fix the symptoms. And it's exactly what you're saying right now. You're like, well, yeah, we're trying to fix the symptoms. but the real source of the problem is the fact that people just aren't interested in finding the truth. And so you say, how do we fix it? And what she and I said in that moment was this podcast.

Just talking about it. Really? Just making people aware of it. And she was really excited that I was coming here to talk about this stuff because hopefully some people are going to watch this. And then you know what? Maybe that's true. And maybe they'll do a little more reading and try and find some resources to deepen their knowledge about the things that they actually think. Just question what it is that you believe and why you believe it.

You know, make sure you can prove to yourself beyond a shadow of a doubt that you believe it. Keep trying to prove it wrong always. And then if you prove it wrong, be willing to let it go. Right. And then find something that's new and more consistent with reality. Do you think there is any kind of solution to something like racism? So people come over, I have a dog. His name is Hero.

He's Nikita, and he's awesome. He's everyone. He's awesome. Nikita? Oh, Akita. Akita. That's type of dog. Yeah, it's a Japanese, it's an American, he's a Japanese dog hunt level,

Japanese mixed with Mastiff and German Shepherd, and he's, everybody loves him. I take him to the park, I take him to get his, he was voted like Pet of the Month in Tallahassee. He's like a little samurai soldier, badass dude. He's just awesome. And people frequently ask me, you know, how did you train him so well, et cetera, how is he so well behaved? And obviously some of it, I was just lucky because he has just a disposition that's amenable and easy to train. But one in particular question is when they come over,

and I have a big open layout and I have company and I'm entertaining guests, maybe I'm cooking or something or I drop like chicken on the floor. Yeah. And he's just like sleeping in the kitchen or in the living room just like totally oblivious. And like, how did you teach him not to beg? And they're just like blown away.

Like it's just so nice not having him sitting there just like begging all the time. How'd you teach him that? And I go, I never taught him not to beg. I never taught him to beg. Right? You're like, well, what am I talking about? Well, the issue is is that when I'm sitting there in the kitchen

and my dog is like walking by and I see it's like, oh, he'd like that. Well, I just want to make him happy. You know, come in your spot and then you just like give him a little treat right there. And this dog's like, oh, so when you're in here, you're doing this, then that means I can get food? This is a thing? Okay. And now every time you're in there cooking, they're like, oh, they're in. Is this food thing going to happen again?

Maybe if I just sit here, I'll get some food. And then you see me like, oh, look at those eyes. And then you give him a treat. And now he just keeps coming back. And suddenly he's like, this is a thing. Like, I come here and I get this food. I love this thing. Let's do this thing more.

relates, in my opinion, to the idea of racism because how do you fix racism? Well, you never teach it in the first place. That's how you fix it. Okay. You just, it should be a thing that in the ideal dream world, there should be no black history month, white history month, because all you're doing is reminding them of a thing that should never even be discussed in the first place. Like, it shouldn't even be an intellectual consideration in the ideal world. Like, the idea that they could ever even be unequal should just be preposterous.

You're just like, well, I don't understand how that it was ever a thing. And just reminding them to think about it is giving the option, the unnecessary option, for one or two crazy people to take it off and make unnecessary things happen. Right. And it's become so bad that there's people that are, for example, white who hate other white people because of the, you know, like Antifa, like the far, far, far left people. When you think everybody else is so racist, And you have to fix the problem, so you have to go to this, you know, extreme level to wear a mask and march on the street and beat the shit out of people because they're white.

And you're also white. I think the, where I see that, for example, is, like, let's just imagine we've got a meter here of equality, if we will. And it's sort of swinging back and forth for whatever reason. And let's say it's sitting over here. In the middle would be this nice, happy equality. And we're sitting way over here where things are pretty much unequal, right? and everybody is like most people are like, we gotta do something about this.

This just isn't the way things should be. So how do we make it better? Should be. Should be. Yeah, I have an interesting little quote that I'm learning to adopt more, and my quote is, there is no should, there is only could. Hmm, yeah. So here we are and here's this arrow,

and so people are saying it should be closer to the middle is what a lot of people say. And the problem, in my opinion, is that, people justify anything that moves the arrow in the opposite direction as being okay. But there are clearly examples where it goes well past the equality and all the way to the other side. Right. And so they misunderstand that, I mean, I can give an obvious extreme example. So one of the things we talked about last time was when you're trying to understand new ideas, push them to zero and push them to infinity to see when they break.

So you understand the constraints of your idea because nothing is perfect. So what's this idea? well, let's say gender inequality. Okay, well, you know a good way to make sure that women are treated better? Well, I don't we just get rid of all the men, okay? Right. And it's a clearly obnoxious example, but it just demonstrates how maybe the needle's too far over here. And yes, what this thing would do is move it towards equality because there would be no more men.

Women would just be optimal. It moved in the opposite direction, but it went so far that there were just no more men. Right. So that, I think, is sort of the source of this like antifa thing. You see that happening a lot. where people feel very, and I've spoken with a lot of these people. Have you? Yeah.

And it's sad, man. People that are associate with Antifa? Not Antifa in particular, excuse me. I just meant these people who see the arrow going in the other direction, like no matter how far it goes, it's justified. Okay. They're not like intentionally evil or malicious or anything. They just feel really violated, just oppressed.

They just feel really unjustly treated. And they just want, they want to find happiness. They want to find contentment. They want to belong. They want to feel like they have opportunities to thrive and succeed. Okay. And so those feelings, they're neither right nor wrong. They're just a thing that we all have and they should be respected because everybody has those.

In fact, I would die for their right to have them because I enjoy the privilege of having them myself. And I think we should all be able to have them, right? Right. So, and so when you see sort of where it's coming from, it's hard. to sort of argue against it when you're there and you're feeling it. You know, we talk about those three things. The emotional arguments are very persuasive. You know, we're humans.

These things sway us strongly. And so you see, you know, here's this little gauge and anything that moves it in the other direction, you know, seems pretty justified. And it's hard to find that line between where it's okay to do this, but now we've gone too far. Let's pass a law that makes us have to hire all the same people. That's fine. Let's pass a law that says we have to. pay them more than that we paid other people to

justify and give them reparations for past treatment or something, maybe we're going a little too far because now the needle is swing in the opposite direction, and then we might get the reverse problem which may or may not be justified depending on who you ask, right? So it gets pretty hairy. Yeah, that's fucking almost impossible to navigate

depending on the issue that you're talking about. My solution, once again, is always the same thing, man. Like if we are just more interested in finding the truth of these things and rather than being right and convincing others of our own ideas you know these antifa people wouldn't need to go fight and be revolutionaries if the people they were fighting were interested in hearing their ideas and cared about what they cared about and wanted to try and find some equal ground where everybody was happy there was this mutual respect this

mutual understanding yeah it's an ideal world like a little utopia thing but i don't think it's as outlandish as it seems all it takes is everyone takes a little individual responsibility over time, over a couple of generations, and then suddenly you find that our culture and communities is much more intrinsically tolerant. That's what education should be for. We just teach people to be tolerant. I agree. And it's easy to be tolerant when you've been subjected to many different things, which is why oftentimes the university crowd are particularly more liberal, because they go to a university where there's all kinds of races and genders, and they're young enough to still be impressionable. And so they're not firm in their convictions,

and suddenly now they're surrounded by all different kinds of people, and everyone is nice, all their friends are nice, and it's just simply different. So you're raised in this environment, and so you're just intrinsically tolerant because that's just the way it was. And so thinking, seeing anything otherwise is just baffling. Right, yeah. Why would this, why would, I know these people, these people are great people.

Why do you hate these people? Right. Yeah, the scary thing also about things like Antifa is that it's just kind of, it's like instigating the same thing on the complete other end of the spectrum. You know what I mean? It's almost like, come on, bring it on. You know what I mean? Like those people, just the fact that they exist and what they're doing,

almost kind of like inspires that to happen on the far opposite end. That's terrifying. What would you do about it, Danny? I don't know what I would do, Nathan. I'm just a dummy who asks questions. Shane, what would you do about this? About what? Antifa.

I don't even know what Antipa. Good for you, man. I envy that. Yeah, honestly. It just works. He just ate He just ate like a How many milligrams was that cookie you ate?

It's like 20, 30 Is that a lot? No No I like cookies Yeah Talk AI To talk AI

For all says to talk AI What can we talk about AI All right so All right listen everybody Machine learning Is not artificial intelligence We are nowhere close to artificial intelligence. These things that you see that are very impressive

that can do allegedly human-level things better than humans are just glorified calculators. Guess what else they can do better than humans? Multiply numbers together. We've never been scared of our calculators. There's no reason to be scared of machine learning because the algorithm that's able to identify certain scribbles and pixels as being a letter isn't going to suddenly walk outside and learn to play basketball

and then feel subjected or they feel like oppressed by your government or how you treated them and then turn around and do your taxes for you, right? So that's not going to happen. Artificial intelligence is at least the general AI, as we like to call it, or human level artificial intelligence. We are so far away from that. That's not going to be happening anytime soon. How far away is that?

Yeah, yeah, sorry. So to be precise, what it really means is we have no idea how to even do it. So theoretically, it could be next year if some, you know, landmark paper and some crazy guy in a garage comes out with some things, some new ideas that we've never thought of, right? It could be as soon as that. What I mean, though, is that there's no, like, slowly building body of knowledge that we've been observing over time where we can now make a reasonable prediction about the future, like we're getting better and better at this. We have no idea.

It seems like there's one, just like one missing piece. it because it's like we're building the brain like google's the brain google is like collective consciousness of everybody on this earth right all the questions that people ask all these podcasts all this information input that's going into this google brain it's almost like there's just one little button that needs to be pushed to turn it into a fucking not at all man and here's why is right is because you have all of this data there right nobody knows what the hell to do with it right so with all of this data what they do is they go okay let's write this algorithm that's know how to make money with it.

They know how to do that very well. They say, let's take all this data and all these videos and let's pass them through this neural network so that we can identify the collection of pixels that resemble a cat. Okay. That's not artificial intelligence. That's just object recognition. Right. Right.

Or, you know, there are some research avenues which are a bit more promising than others, like reinforcement learning, which is this idea that, rather than just giving some clear objective function and then training some network to do this one task really well, what you do is you basically say, here, go do this thing, and I'm going to reward you when you do it well or discourage you when you don't do it well, whatever it is.

And it'll learn what it should do based on the rewards that you give it over time and the reinforcements that you give it over time. That's the field of reinforcement learning. Wow. But even that, you know, that's been around for a while, but even that isn't doing particularly well. So, for example, there's a lot of really interesting things that have happened.

So let's say that you create a spider robot, and you give it a reinforcement learning algorithm that says, I want you to eat humans. That's an undesirable one, but. Terrifying one. Yeah. Thankfully, these spiders were just in a simulation on a computer, so they weren't real.

So yeah, maybe we can give them that. I thought you're talking about like an actual one. Giant metal spider or something. That would be pretty gnarly. Yeah. Yeah, so these are little simulated robots and like a little simulation environment. And you basically say,

I want you to travel as far as you can by minimizing the amount of time that your little feet hit the ground. Hmm. What do you think it's going to learn to do? Like, what sort of behavior does it learn to do? Well, what it learned to do was to flip over on its back

and walk on its little elbows. It minimized the time. It achieved zero time. Wow. All right. So this is another one. So you can say, for example, there's a robotic arm and they wanted to teach it to like stack blocks. So they basically said, okay, I'm going to reward you.

So when you pick up this block, I'm going to reward you by how far away the bottom of this block is from the ground. And so it can learn to like maybe just stack things. That was like this fundamental idea. Okay. Give it this notion. So what did it learn to do? It just learned to flip all the blocks over. because the bottom of the blocks were the width of the block away,

and then you add all of those up for all the blocks, and that's a pretty big number. Right, right, right, right. Wow. Right, so this is the idea that even reinforcement learning, like, when you give it an objective or you give it this, like, esoteric goal that you'd like to reinforce it for, you have no idea what it's going to learn to do.

And oftentimes these things are relatively creative, you know, so you might call this, like, creativity. Well, creativity, then, is just some local minima and some objective cost function that achieves an unexpected, result. You know, that's really all it is, but that's fine, so be it. What is creativity? Can you teach an AI or a robot creativity?

Well, that's essentially what it is, right? So if you give it an objective, here's this cost function, and you constrain its ability to solve this problem and it still solves it, that's basically creativity. That is creativity. Which is flipping over on your elbows and walking around or flipping these

blocks over. It's like a way that we wouldn't have thought about solving this problem. Holy shit. But that's not impressive because it didn't demonstrate any like superior intelligence to be clever about this. All it did is just found a local minima on some, which is what it would have done anyways if you didn't constrain it so much. Literally all it's doing is just finding a minima. So what do I mean by that? You know what I'm saying?

What I mean by that? Here's the cost function. And if you're over here, it costs more. And if you're over here, it costs more. And so you want to find the set of parameters that bring you down here. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So that's basically what that.

means and everything in machine learning is just minimizing cost functions and it's just really big computers really big uh data sets and you're just minimizing a cost function to do really cool things but it's not intelligence it's not artificial intelligence it's just a calculator just a really big fancy super expensive calculator right for now for now and what would turn that calculator into a giant killing machine that would threaten humanity like what would it take Like how far away is a threat like that? Like legitimately, we can already do that.

Everyone has a different opinion on it. Like Elon Musk always says that, you know, it's a huge threat. We need to start putting regulations in place now for companies like Boston, what is it called, Boston robotics or, you know, companies like that. Like, he's super terrified. He makes it seem like it's, we're right on the horizon of something like that. As other people who don't. Yeah.

All right. So whether his concerns are justified. or not in as much as, like, assume AI does exist, perhaps what he's saying is pretty reasonable, right? You know, we do want to make sure that if we're going to do this thing, we do it wisely, we do it intelligently, we understand the problem, we consider it enough into the future and its consequences and everything to regulate it in a reasonable way.

But he doesn't do research in the field, and he doesn't, this isn't his thing. We're nowhere near as close to it as he says or thinks we are, right? Okay. So, and this isn't, I mean, you can trust me if you want, or you can just go read all the research papers that have been published at like the past three leading conferences and machine learning and they're all doing the same thing i got point one percent more improvement in this emnis data set or i just did a super big jumbo by gan network i connected three generative adversarial networks and it's not it's not artificial intelligence it's mostly just

pushing forward incrementally and like a little rabbit hole of optimization that isn't what true artificial intelligence is really about. Okay. Right. So basically you're saying, how far away are we from it? Well, what I would say to that is

if we're following the route that we're going, it's nowhere in the foreseeable future, right? Because this isn't the way that we're going to get to these things in general. We need a breakthrough, like a completely new approach to how to go about solving this. What kind of approach would that be in your...

That's my research, and that's what I'm interested in. Right. So that's what I work on. So the way that I describe it is as follows, right? So artificial neural networks currently machine learning, the thing that everybody calls AI is you have a big box, call it your neural network, okay, who cares how it works,

and you have this cost function, this objective, this thing you're trying to tell it to do. Label cats better, so basically a goal. A goal, right? And so all you do is you give it a thing, this thing that you'd like it to behave on, and then you measure how well it behaved, And then you say, okay, well, you didn't do that well.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to update all of the, I'm going to update the neural network, such that the next time I present the same thing to you, you do this job better. Okay. That's machine learning in a nutshell, okay? Okay. The problem. It's getting better every time. Yes, but what you do is you say, here's an objective, here's this thing, and get better at doing this over time.

That's machine learning in a nutshell. Okay. The problem, though, is this is top down, okay? So what this means is that we have defined this objective function for the neural network and then we're trying to get it to learn to do this task that we want it to do. That's not how intelligence came about, right? Our intelligence is self-organizing and emergent. Our intelligence is bottom up. We have a bunch of little neurons that are just randomly presented with some stimulus from the environment, photons, waves, pressure waves coming and bending the little hairs in our

ears, electromagnetic fields, et cetera. And it comes into our nervous system and our neurons at the bottom level just slowly start adapting to process and identify this input, right? And so they're sort of self-organizing in the sense that the updates that they have at this level are local. And then over time, as you keep presenting more and more information, these things start combining hierarchically until what we call intelligence, this sort of behavior, which a couple of things that we classify as being intelligent, emerges as a property. So machine learning is top down. I understand. We need to be doing bottom up. And the reason that's really difficult is because we have to let go of being in control.

Right? So because for what we like to do, say, here's an objective function, do this one thing well. And the neural network learns to do it, and that's fine. That's not intelligence, which is why we're never going to get towards, like, AI with this. What we need to do is say, let's get thousands and millions of neurons and give them these small little rules and connect them together in some way that allows them to adapt and then just present it with information. and then it's going to self-organize into a way that it processes the information that's useful and behaves in a way that allows it to survive and do things that we don't really know what it's going to do. We have to let go of that objective behavior that we're always seeking in science.

We're always going to be objective about things, but I don't think that, I mean, this is a new... Why would the human race ever want to do that? Well, because we want to understand ourselves. at the potential cost of destroying ourselves? Obviously people are afraid of if we create something bigger or more advanced than we are, we'll just become pets. Yeah, here's the thing. I mean, that's the thought process, right?

I mean, that's what you have to be okay with that. If something like that were to happen, but that's one of infinitely many possible futures. What if it comes to be benevolent and loves everyone and wants to make our lives better? Or what if maybe it does subjugate us but saves us from global warming and starvation? I mean, so, for example, people don't really like the owning of animals. And they say, oh, well, you shouldn't own animals or pets let them live out in wild. Maybe that's the case.

But if their argument is because they're happier out there, that's not as obvious anymore. I mean, my dog is pretty happy. I treat him well. We exercise all the time. He loves people. He gets scratches. He would never receive anywhere near that much just. fulfillment out in nature, right?

Is that good or is it bad? I don't know. Maybe he didn't have the opportunity and we shouldn't have taken it away from him. I don't know. That's an argument. But if it comes to pure happiness, he's pretty happy.

So what if these AI come about and they're super intelligent and they treat us like little pets and they just keep us in little palaces where we have infinite food and happiness and we can just explore and read books and just play music and have sex and just be merry? I don't know.

You really against that? Maybe we're just pets. And they're like, oh, look, they're having sex. That's cute. I've never heard of it. I've never heard of it described that way. But here's the thing is what I just proposed is just as plausible as whatever sort of future that we imagine, right?

The problem is that they're all equally possible because we have no idea what would happen. People tend to jump towards the immediately scary things because we have an inclination to do that. Right. But we have no evidence to suggest it is by definition beyond our ability to understand. Like how would we dare presume how it would think if it's beyond us in the first place.

Yeah. You know what I mean? It's purely speculation at that point. Why immediately jump to the one scary thing out of the infinitely many possible explanations? Why is that the only one that everyone's obsessed with? It's entertaining. I don't like horror movies. My problem with horror movies is that they're scary.

Why do people like scary things, dude? They just do. It's, I don't know. Anime is awesome, too. Anime is awesome. I love anime. Do you watch Try Gunn yet? No, I haven't.

I need to. His interview is over. What time is it? How long we've been on the? That's a motherfucker interview. I don't know. How long has it been going, or fall? Hour 36.

Hour 36? Oh, this is a good one. We're flying through it. That's almost like two hours in something, I think. That's a good one. I don't know. Do you feel satisfied?

Did we cover... I think we covered a lot of really, really good shit. Would you get that, uh... That microchip? Elon wants to put in your brain? God, no. He has... Here's the thing, man.

Oh, the neural link. Listen, man. Go and read the research coming out of that place. Like, look at the papers and the things that they're publishing. He's like talking about doing human experiments. They are so far away from being remotely capable of doing what he says that it's capable of doing. It's basically a publicity stunt.

There's no research to suggest it. And here's the thing. Really? Okay. There's always hypothetical scenarios and you can say this is a theoretical approach of how this might be solved, et cetera, et cetera. But here's the thing, right? Elon Musk is one person. He's hired a couple dozen pretty smart neuroscience.

and researchers. There's hundreds and thousands of them all over the globe, all trying to do the same thing. So the question is, why is it that suddenly he and his guys are going to come up with an approach that all of the other people around the whole globe is saying isn't really possible right now? We know the state of the art. We know the technology. We're really far from being able to do this. Why is it that we should suddenly believe that just he and his small team of people who put out a few papers that have demonstrated, you know, maybe some interesting ideas, but nothing even remotely close to putting a chip in our brain that's going to be able to interface with our thoughts and do the things that he's promising, right?

Doesn't try it on anybody? No, I mean, they just recently said that he's going to try human trials soon. On medical patients or patients that need it for medical reasons, right? I didn't read the full article. I just read it and then I immediately went to look at the research because I was like, wow, he's going to do it. This research must have been coming along. Where do you find research like this?

Go to Google Scholar. I mean, that's the best place to start from. Yeah. that's a great place to start from. And then usually you go to their websites and then they'll have like blogs or they have their research section. Like you go to OpenAI and then they have their research. And then they have their whole research section.

Okay. And even in NewsSai, we're actually working on a new website right now, labs.com slash. Where we will start exposing some of our research internally. We'll make some blog post sharing some of the things that we've been doing. Okay. So that's how you can go to the company and oftentimes they expose their research. So why do you think he's doing this?

big publicity stunt about NeurLink and being able to just so, I mean, obviously the goal of it is just to be able to seamlessly connect with any kind of like cellular, like your phone or your computer with just thinking about it, right? Like thinking about sending a text and you can do it. What if you can do it? Yeah. Okay. So a couple of things. Great question. Firstly, I'm not saying that it is a publicity stunt. I'm saying that it probably would be given the fact that I I'm pretty sure that we're not really close to being capable of doing these things. That being said, I would never want to discourage somebody from trying, right? So there's a difference between sort of being realistic and then just being oppressive

and just being a party pooper, right? So, and for all I know, maybe he believes that they can. And he just, and maybe it's his sheer believing in the way, makes the way mentality that allows him to bring these companies about because he just simply believes in the impossible enough that he brings people together and makes these crazy things happen. And maybe it will. And that'd be great and exciting.

However, statistically speaking, at least as far as the technology that we're aware and people trying to do these things in the past, that's not probable. And what if he does do it? Yeah. If you proved it, it worked, would you get one? Would I get one? Yeah, that's an interesting question.

They've got to drill a hole in your skull. Yeah, no, I wouldn't. Yeah, not yet, because that's way to, early in the prototype, there'd be mistakes and accidents and what you're interfacing with. I would wait until it became much more well established. I'd research it much more thoroughly. I could see Danny get more. I think Elon should be the first one to do it.

I like that. Yeah, I mean, police officers have to get maced before they can mace other people. It's only fair. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, that is only fair. He should be the first one to do it. Could you imagine him on one of those neural links and it actually worked? What does it work means?

I'm not really even sure. Elon Musk is running around fucking, you know, inventing things on 10 times the level he is right now. You know? It'd be crazy. You think Elon Musk invents these things? He doesn't invent them, but he's a huge team of researchers and people like yourself, machine learning experts and scientists and people that are doing that. I mean, he has a whole army of people like that that are trying to be. I think he just from.

What his interview say he just comes up with simple ideas and then has them execute it, like the tunnel idea. Like he said, I hated LA traffic. All right. A couple of things. Firstly, the tunnel idea, it's not a very good one. All right. So that's just not really a little bit. Or maybe it's a good idea, but it is not working in that company, the whole like boring thing.

Why? Why? Because it was nothing that he remotely promised. It's like basically a car on a, it's a train. It's a train tunnel. It's what it is. And not even a very good one, right? But your car is supposed to sit on the, like,

a skateboard, right? And it shoots your car through a tunnel underneath the city. Yeah. That's what he promised, isn't it? No, he feels like this hyper-rails, hyper-loop thing. No, that's different. The hyper-loop's different, right? I think the hyperloop is completely different than the tunnels.

Well, here's the idea, in my mind, that's kind of Elon Musk, right? He's like, got all these ideas, and they sort of just, he says these things and gets money, and then it sort of, like, formulates into a thing. And then he feels like- He's really good at getting money. Right? Yeah, so, but here's the thing, right? you just said he comes up with these ideas, the simple ideas, and then gets people together to do it.

Well, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Everybody could just sit back and just smoke a joint, drink a beer, be like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we all had chips in our brains that let us interface with computers? That'd be pretty neat. I mean, everybody's thought of that. That isn't an impressive thing. What's impressive is the ability to actually carry it out, having the wherewithal, the intelligence, the resources, the discipline to actually do the hard work for years and years and carry it out. that in my opinion is what deserves respect not the people who come up with the ideas but people who actually make it happen but i mean there's also you know the guys like him who who innovate it and

make it all happen and bring everyone together and organize it all into one place and and i agree bringing the money you bring in the experts and go on a fucking giant podcast and let everyone know about it so now you have all this attention surrounding you and i agree with that you can make it happen i agree with that my initial comment was when you said he goes around inventing things Right, right. And when you, like, watch his podcast, he, I mean, he's like, yeah. Did you watch it? Yeah.

What did you think about it? I wasn't impressed. I felt like he was a little conceited and almost in a, like, a trying to convince people away. He's like, yeah, I've got all these ideas. It's like constant explosions in my brain. It's very, very hard to explain. Yeah, it's like, people don't, people who are smart don't talk like that.

Like, think about the really intelligent, impressive people. that you've respected, they usually don't, like, tell you how smart they are and try to, like, convince you with these weird descriptions, you know. Yeah. I mean. Wow. That was a fucking solid hour and 45 minutes, Nathan. I always enjoyed chat with you guys, man.

That was really cool. I learned to shitload. Yeah, I feel like I attended a whole class today. We did. Good. We did. And it's free. And everyone can learn if they want.

They don't have to pay. Not a dime. There you go. Cool, man. Well, thanks again. And hopefully we'll get. you on here again soon and enjoy your trip to europe i'm going to have a blastie blast this gonna be great we're gonna climb mount tayday dude it's gonna be great mount what mount tayday it's the highest

peak in spain really yeah i'm excited i brought a i brought a laser pointer for the stars and we're just going to like point out the stars i'm gonna pretend like i know like constellations and trying impress people be like look look at all these stars over here i could tell them about it but it has like constant explosions in my brain it's too difficult for you to understand Nathan musk everybody thanks man my pleasure cheers You know,