Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Aliens Are Watching: Robin Hanson's Controversial Theory

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/TOE #rulapod Try Huel with 15% OFF + Free Gift for New Customers today using my code theoriesofeverything at https://huel.com/theoriesofeverything . Fuel your best performance with Huel today! Is Earth being monitored by an advanced civilization one million years ahead of us? And does this alien civilization actually share an ancient past with humanity? Economist Robin Hanson explores a provocative theory suggesting that highly evolved extraterrestrials may be subtly observing us—either as caretakers or as part of a long-running experiment. From there, the conversation delves into the intricacies of academic funding and the peer review process. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Links Mentioned: - Robin’s blog: https://www.overcomingbias.com/ - Robin’s profile: https://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson - Robin’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/0198754620 - Tyler Cowen on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwieLd7Lyc8&ab_channel=CurtJaimungal - Gregory Chaitin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEuav8G6sY - Matthew Segal on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeTm4fSXpbM - Daniel Van Zant’s article on incentive markets: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/breakthrough-incentive-markets - Michael Levin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s - Lue Elizondo on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAmFlLfsZKM - Ross Coulthart on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQnGcX7oxms Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:36 - The Great Filter 05:38 - Where Are The Aliens? 09:13 - UFOs 16:50 - Panspermia 23:05 - Alien Hierarchies 27:30 - Alien Culture & Motivations 33:18 - Probability of Aliens 39:18 - Truth 49:41 - Fall of Academia 01:11:27 - Peer Review 01:20:22 - Ranking Ideas 01:23:09 - The System is “Broken” Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #aliens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Almost surely if there were aliens and they had a modestly independent origin, they would be maybe 10 million, 100 million years more advanced than us. And that's large enough that you should look at the evidence. They picked something sort of in the middle. They decided to hang out at the edge of our visibility, not being invisible, not being visible. That's kind of weird. Basically half of the universe right now could be filled with aliens,

but we still couldn't see it from here because they expand so fast that you don't see them until they're almost here. Cultural evolution is humanity's superpower. This isn't just side to side thing. This is the whole thing. This is what makes humans different from the other aliens. And it's really a scarily random process. We trust our culture to give us our values, our norms, and we assume it must come from somewhere. Academia talks as if its main product was intellectual progress or insight, but plausibly its main actual product is prestige. And there is a huge demand for prestige. Robin Hansen, an economics professor at George Mason University and research associate at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, coined the influential concept of the great filter

to account for extraterrestrial life. In this episode, he applies the same analytic rigor to human institutions. From his statistical case that aliens may actually be watching us right now, to his radical proposal for using prediction markets to fix academia's so-called broken incentives, a term he used which I countered. His groundbreaking grabby aliens theory and work on cultural evolution offers a stark warning. Our global monoculture may be humanity's greatest vulnerability. Welcome. Nice to meet you, sir.

Okay. You've coined something called the great filter. What is the great filter and where are the aliens? We live in this vast universe. It goes on and on and on. And we're alive and we have a history of life. Life seems to have started somewhere in our past near here, developed into us, and we look to our future and go, we should become big. We should become powerful. We should become powerful.

We should leave this planet, even the solar system, and we could remake stars, remake the galaxies. We have this great potential as a future. And we look out in the universe and we think, well, we can't be the only ones. There must have been other places that didn't have life then created life and created us and then went on to this big future.

But where are they? That is, we don't see much of this big future out of the universe. So that creates this question, where are the aliens? Fermi's question, where is everybody? So I re-framed this question a different way. I said, okay, well, there's this process starting from simple dead matter, going through simple life, advanced life like us, even more advanced life that could be visible in the universe.

There's a physical process by which things start at one end and get to the other end of that chain. And at the end of that chain, there's almost nothing. The universe seems to have almost nothing out there that has reached this end that we think is a plausible end for us. And so that means it's really hard to go along this path. And we can think of how that's hard as a filter. There are places where many things start

and they don't always end. Some things knock them off the path. So the great filter is the sum total of all these obstacles from starting from simple dead matter to becoming the visible expanding life that you could see from a long way away, which we don't see. Examples of these filters, examples of these obstacles. Right, so for example, your planet could just never evolve life in the first place.

Or it could never evolve sexual selection, or it could never evolve multicellular creatures, right? Or it never involves social intelligence in the brain. These are all things that could never have, might never have happened. And so the question is, how hard was it to go from each step to the next step? And that difficulty would be the filter. You can think of it as if it happened at one moment, what's the chances? Did it have to go down a really lucky path? And if it had gone down other paths, that would have been just a dead end and never could have gotten at it or is it like a slow trying process? If you have to try billions of

possibilities and eventually gets to the one that works. And you're referring to globally catastrophic for this for the civilization or for the life form. So that is to say if some if there are five parallel life forms evolving and you slice away two or some catastrophe happens that only affects two out of the five, these three continue, you don't consider that a filter? It wouldn't so much be a problem if the others could go ahead. But if say there's different ways of configuring life and if one succeeds, it blocks all the others, well, that could be a filter because maybe you needed to go one of the other paths and you couldn't have got here except for

that. So the thing is to notice it might be hard to get to where we are and it might be hard to get from here to where we hope to be. So the filter is whatever's making this hard. So I just thought of restating the question, where is everybody as how big is the filter and in particular, how of a have we passed. Because if we're almost through the filter then maybe it'll be pretty easy for us to go out there and be visible and expand and achieve what we hope. But if more of the filters ahead of us then our odds are pretty low. We should still try but can't have too much hope. Hi, Kurt here. If you're enjoying this conversation, please take a second to like and to share this video

with someone who may appreciate it. It actually makes a difference in getting these ideas out there. Subscribe of course. Thank you. Okay, so where are the aliens? The aliens are either nowhere because we're the only creatures in the universe or they're out there but they somehow can't leave their planets. There's some obstacle that they always stay small and can't go very, you know, very far.

They are at our level but never get much farther or they're out there and there's a lot of them but we can't see them because they haven't gotten here yet. So one way there could be a lot of aliens in the universe is if they expand really fast. Because that means you wouldn't see them until they're almost here. So that's the basis of my grabby aliens analysis. I did this great filter analysis roughly, you know, 25 years ago. And then in the, you know, five years ago, I returned to the topic and tried to do a more numerical analysis. I had a mathematical model of the distribution of aliens in space-time with three parameters,

each of which I fit to data, me and colleagues. And that can tell us where everybody is in space-time. And I think we have a fit to that model so I can roughly tell you. So there's three creek parameters. The idea is aliens appear at random places in spacetime. They appear at random times, but the random time has a power law, we could explain. That is, it's more likely later in time and earlier in time.

There's a constant and a power in the power law. So you mean to say they're randomly distributed in space, but not spacetime because time has a different distribution? Right. That is, very early, that's almost no chance they appear. And then they appear more and more rapidly as time goes on. And that's because there's a hard steps model that makes that prediction. And then once they appear, they start expanding and there's a speed of expansion. But the interesting thing to note is they expand very fast,

then you have very little chance of seeing them until they get here. That is, if they were in your backward light cone, they would be here now instead of us and we could not have appeared. So the only way our part of space-time can be empty waiting for us is if they're not here, which case that's a selection effect that says they could be lots of places elsewhere in space-time, but they're not right here because if they had been in our past, they would be here instead of us. So the aliens expanding very fast is the way there could be a lot of them.

Basically, half of the universe right now could be filled with aliens, but we still couldn't see it from here because they expand so fast that you don't see them until they're almost here. So that's one way of saying where are the aliens? They're all over, but they expand really fast, more than say half the speed of light, which is crazy fast. And where are you getting that number half the speed of light? I get that from fitting this model to our data. So if I make a statistical model of aliens in space-time and I try the parameter they

expand slowly, what I see is that at any one time any civilization appears in the universe, when it looks out to see other alien civilizations, it sees a lot of them. But as I increase the speed of expansion, the number of other alien civilizations that they see decreases. And when they get a high enough speed, they don't see any. So that when we look out and we don't see any, then we say, aha, that's showing us the speed is very high. Okay. So what credence do you place that the UFOs that are seen,

some of them are going to be some atmospheric effect or something else that's misidentified, but that remaining percentage that the pilots and government seems to think it's not of any worldly government. What credence do you assign to those as being actual aliens? So there's two steps of a UFO analysis. In a Bayesian analysis, there's what's called a prior, your estimate of the likelihood of a scenario, independent of the evidence you've seen.

And secondly, there's a likelihood, which is what's the chance that this evidence you've seen would arise if this hypothesis were true. So I've looked at the concrete evidence of UFOs, and I'm not an expert on that, but my rough judgment is some of it is pretty weird and not easily dismissed. So that at least makes the likelihood not crazy, but my analysis of aliens makes me an expert on the prior. So I feel like I should speak up as an expert and say, okay, having done this analysis of grab aliens, I am well placed to think about what the prior should be on whether UFOs could

be aliens. You'll have to combine that with the likelihood to see it, the actual thing. So as an example, on average in a murder trial, one in 1,000 people on average are murdered, and one in 1,000 associates might be the murderer. So that makes any one accusation of a murder roughly a one in a million prior. But typical a murder trial a one in a million prior. But typical a murder trial can collect sufficient evidence to overcome a one in a million prior

to get you to convict the accused as murder, right? So that's roughly what we're thinking about. Can we get the prior up to one in a million or even higher here? And if in which case you'll have to look at the evidence to make the decision. Some people want to say, this is so crazy hypothesis you have, I don't need to look at the evidence to make the decision. Some people want to say, this is so crazy a hypothesis you have, I don't need to look at your evidence, that's just wrong. And if the prior were, I don't know, one in 10 to the 20, then that might be right. So the question is, how high is the prior?

So basically, in order to produce a prior, what I have to try to do is construct the most plausible scenario that's consistent with what we know about the universe and them eventually showing up here as UFOs. So my analysis there, I get a prior roughly one in 10,000 to one in a thousand. And that's large enough that you should look at the evidence. It's not certain at all. If you didn't see any evidence, you would dismiss it as not likely, right? But since there is evidence, I gotta say you should look at it because this is not a crazy prayer.

So, would you like to go through the actual scenario? Sure. Okay. So, when we're trying to explain UFOs as aliens, there's a couple of key features we need to explain. One is, you know, the universe around us is empty. UFOs as aliens, there's a couple of key features we need to explain. One is, you know, the universe around us is empty. So we're positing that there were aliens close enough to arrive here, but they didn't go everywhere else around.

So we need to explain why aren't they everywhere else? Why are they only here if they're here and not somewhere else? Secondly, we need to explain, okay, they didn't go everywhere else, but they did come here. Why did they're here and not some of us. Secondly, we need to explain, okay, they didn't go everywhere else but they did come here. Why did they come here? Third, the thing they're doing here is a bit weird. So I'll phrase it as, they are not completely invisible nor really obvious.

Now, both of these would be relatively easy. So for context, almost surely if there were aliens and they had a modestly independent origin, they would be maybe 10 million, 100 million years more advanced than us. Like it would be very unlikely there are only a thousand years more advanced.

That would be a crazy time coincidence. So you're by assumption imagining alien species that's way more advanced than this. 10 million, hundred million years. So with that level of advancedness, not only could they have easily colonized the whole galaxy or more very visibly, if they were around here, they could have been completely invisible or completely visible. Those would be just options.

Trivial for them. Right. Exactly. So now we have to puzzle. They didn't choose either of those two options. They picked something sort of in the middle. They decided to hang out at the edge of our visibility, not being invisible, not being visible.

That's kind of weird. And for all some, those things do mean very much there, right? They didn't make a big mega city here on Earth or around Saturn or something. They're not making huge factories or construction projects. They're just kind of flitting about, not really doing anything, not interacting. And that's kind of weird, right? So I need a story that predicts that.

Or interacting seldomly. But to a little consequence it seems, right? What's the point of coming all this way if that's what you're gonna do? And you know, I think this is part of the puzzle. So if you say, I need a theory that explains the UFO as alien scenario. I need a story where the UFOs, some of them

are actually aliens who then came from a long way away, who are then are much older than us, who nevertheless did not colonize the galaxy, decided to come here, and then decided to hang out at this edge of visibility thing, not doing much of anything. Okay. That's my challenge. I'm going to come up with a story.

Yeah. Okay. Now, here's something else to think about. If they're one million years advanced, more advanced, whatever advanced means. Right. More time of development, say. Sure. Would we expect that the story that they have for whatever their motivation is to be comprehensible to us? Let's be honest. Understanding the nature of reality is difficult, but sometimes just being a person is more difficult. There have been moments in my life, there's stress, there's burnout, there's psychological spirals, emotional events where I wish I had someone to talk to who was actually qualified, not just philosophically, but clinically. That's why I think what Rula is doing is wonderfully important.

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Would we expect that the story that they have for whatever their motivation is to be comprehensible to us. We have theories of evolution and of the behavior of creatures that are not that specific to us in our particular history. We have the theory of natural selection, for example. That's supposed to be a theory of biological evolution on Earth for the last four billion years and plausibly on alien planets as well. And we have a lot of theories of social behavior that are not just supposed to be about human social behavior, they're about animal social

behavior and they would be about alien social behavior. So this is a question about how much do we actually know about behavior and I'd say we know more than just humans recent behavior. We know more generally about the nature of behavior And that's what I would I would need to base my story and something like that Okay, so Here are the elements of a story to explain UFOs as aliens The first is so in my simplest model Aliens appear roughly one per million galaxies.

So, their spacing is really far apart. So, one per million galaxies puts the nearest aliens way, way far away from here, which means it's going to be really hard for them to get here. So, one way to get around that is to postulate that they have a common origin with us. That is, the typical alien is way, way out there, but we happen to have a common origin with us. That is, the typical alien is way, way out there, but we happen to have a common origin. That is, there was some Eden planet, sorry, there was some Eden planet, and it evolved life,

and then life left that planet and seeded multiple other planets. And the time for that, plausibly, would have been the origin of the solar system, i.e., our star was formed in a nursery with maybe 10,000 other stars, all at the same place and time, all close together. So if something had seeded that with life, it might plausibly have seeded many, many planets with life, just stars.

Now, that puts them closer to us in space and time. So now their planet goes evolving life for four billion years, ours does, and then they happen to be first before us. And that puts them maybe a few thousand light years away from us, you see. This is the way we get a correlation between them and us. There's still this vast empty universe, but they're much closer than a random other alien would be because they have a common origin. So a common origin in space and time puts them closer to us in space and time, which makes it feasible for them to get here. Oh, sorry, what's the mechanism that this Eden planet is seeding life on other planets? Just rocks.

Basically the simplest story of panspermia is rocks are constantly falling from the sky, smashing planets and kicking up little rocks that drift away off to other things. There's not intent there. Otherwise, you would just say that that was the life form prior. Just be random. Got it. And the idea would be the earliest life we see on Earth is not the simplest possible life.

That's actually the result of many billions of years of previous evolution. This life that got kicked off would still be very simple life. So it doesn't have much intention or plans or anything like that. It's just a very simple, robust life. It was sitting inside a rock, it got kicked off, and then it seeded our initial solar system. So in the initial nursery, these stars were all very close with lots of rocks flying back and forth.

So if life appeared in any part of that, could it easily have spread to the rest? So we have panspermia siblings is the story. Panspermia seeded and then seeded across and then we have a sibling. There's another star and planet out there that evolved life before us and that's why they're correlated. Now, so that's the first thing we need,

panspermia siblings. It's not obvious, but it's not a crazy scenario, okay. Second, we need them to decide and enforce no colonization. They could have, when they reached our level, and soon afterwards, they could have colonized the galaxy. So how do we explain that they didn't? The simplest way is they had a choice and they chose not to. So we already see in our world people who would disapprove of colonizing

the universe, who would dislike that. And it's true that the moment you allow interstellar colonists, you lose central control of your civilization and your culture. From that point on, those whoever goes away, they could eventually come back and compete with you for control of where they came from. The only way to keep a coherent culture is to prevent interstellar colonization. And then you could, and many people love a coherent culture, the idea that we as a world can talk to each other, decide together on what we approve of, and decide on regulation of technology and culture, etc. And that all ends the moment you let colonists leave to other stars. So they could plausibly have disliked that scenario and said, no, we do not want our

civilization to fragment and become out of control and compete with each other. We want to stay this coherent civilization. Therefore they chose no colonies allowed. Now, that's a really hard rule to enforce. So we also have to postulate they were capable enough of actually enforcing this rule over 10 or 100 million years. And so that meant they had to be really strict about ever letting anybody leave home. And so then we have to postulate they made an exception to that very strict rule because they realize their siblings pansmermia siblings could break the rule That is if we reach this level and we go expand the universe that

undermines the point of their rule against expanding into the universe and so They would want as a side effect of wanting to keep everybody at home to go to their siblings and keep them from leaving And so now we have a reason for them to come here. A reason why they aren't anywhere else in the universe, i.e. they prevented, you know, very much travel away from their home. And they allowed a single exception, at least very few exceptions, to come here. And it gives them a reason why they're here. The reason is to convince us to follow their rule, to not expand.

So we've explained why the universe seems empty, why they are nearest in space-time, why they have traveled here and what their point of being here. But the final thing we haven't explained is, yeah, but why are they doing this weird thing of hanging out at the edge of visibility? So for that last part, I want to postulate that they have dominance hierarchies like most social animals on earth do. They have status hierarchies and they also have domestication. That is, we domesticated other animals and ourselves by trying to slip into

the top of other animal status hierarchies. And the way you do that is to be there, be more impressive and powerful than the others, and peaceful enough, and then they choose you as their highest status animal, and then they do what you say. That's how we domesticate dogs and horses and other animals is by slipping in the top of their status hierarchy. So this is their strategy to convince us to do what they say, which is to be here, be roughly peaceful, be more impressive than the rest of us.

And that should be enough if it's done consistently and clearly enough that we will see them, respect them, and defer to them. And then you might say, yeah, but don't they need to tell us what they want? And no, they don't because we should Be able to figure this out They can see that we're smart enough that we can figure this out. And so once we see that they're there and they're not talking But they're impressive we can figure out why they're here and we will then Plausibly not surely do what they say choose not to expand almost surely they have a plan B

Which isn't going to work so well for us if we seem not inclined to follow their suggestion. They have some button they can press that will prevent us from doing it. Now, remember this is an exception, right? They have this strict rule against expansion. Every colony they set, anybody they let leave their home world is risking their entire agenda of preventing expansion in the universe. Any one thing that left could break it all.

So they have to have tight controls over this expedition. They would not want to give this expedition a lot of resources and discretion. They want to send it out there with a clear plan, only give it the resources necessary to implement that plan and tight controls on, no, it doesn't get to invent new plans, it doesn't get to make discretionary choices and everything else. It has to follow the plan because it's a very risky thing again to go out there. So what plan could they have sent from far away, hardly knowing us, that doesn't require much modification? Well, this domestication plan fits that agenda.

It's very simple. You show up, you hang around in the sky, you just hang at the edge of visibility, and you're impressive. Now you might say, well, look, couldn't they have shown up and then be really visible? Like, you know, come in the White House lawn and talk to us a lot. Well, they could have figured plausibly that, look, on humans on earth, when other humans try to domesticate humans, we often resist that because we get into our head that they are slightly different culture of humans is so terribly evil

that we couldn't possibly allow ourselves to submit to that. And that's slightly different humans on earth. So these are actual aliens. So they could be pretty sure that there's probably something about them we hate, if only we would know about it, and they don't want to risk that. So they're not going to reveal lots of details about themselves. They just want to reveal the basic facts. They're here, they're peaceful, they are more powerful than us. That's all you need to know. that's all you need to know.

That's all they need to show. And eventually, when they become convinced that they're actually there, we can figure out why and you will ultimately be persuaded. A lot of people who are into UFOs and believe that UFOs really are aliens, a lot of them think aliens are here with a message and they have some wisdom to impart and they really seem to be quite willing to go along with the aliens' advice. So that doesn't seem crazy. Just to be clear, I'm not that, I'm not, I don't find this good news.

I was hoping that we had a big universe open to us that we could just go out and do big things if only we could handle our internal problems, which seemed to be a risk. But apparently, if UFOs as aliens is actually true, there's a big brother around, and they have an agenda for our life. It's like you had parents, and you have to work on your parents' business because your parents insist, right?

Or you have to marry who your parents say because they insist. Well, here, apparently, we have big brother or parents around who are just have, are going to insist that we follow their plans. Do you think that's the most effective strategy? So it's just one strategy to appear at the edge of your perception and subtly influence. Is that the most effective?

Is that the best one that you could think of? Well, again, other strategies would seem to involve showing more of themselves to us. And the question is, what's the chance that we wouldn't hate something about them? Maybe they eat babies. Who knows? They don't think it's a big deal, but apparently we might. I mean, they're actually aliens, right? Look, just look at how much we are reluctant to trust foreigners on Earth as humans, even

though humans are really quite similar to us all around the world. But they have some slight different customs or whatever, and then suddenly we're all over it. Okay, they don't have juries, so they must have an evil law system. So we couldn't defer to them, right? So just slight differences and we're willing to sort of go to war with them. Right. Now in that case, would you say that the fear of foreigners would be irrational? I would say, you know, basically if you think our temptation to be domesticated depends on the cultural similarity between us and them, that's plausibly a good result of past cultural evolution.

Our past cultural evolution probably just did not anticipate aliens. That didn't happen to us in the past, right? So our habit in terms of who do we submit to and who don't we probably made sense in our distant past, but that doesn't mean it's well arranged. So notice that humans domesticated other humans, and especially within a society. So if you think about an emperor with a huge palace

and a crown and a big parade of soldiers, that's to domesticate the locals. That is emperors often did the domestication thing of being the most impressive creature around to get locals to submit to the emperor's rule, right? Kings are following the strategy. Certainly, it works at a local enough level. But again, we've often said we have kings, but they have tyrants. So even people just a little bit over, we go, we couldn't submit to them. They're a tyrant.

So, I mean, people have been able to expand their empire, but it's often harder the farther you go from your cultural center to try to get people to submit. So do you think that they want us to retain our free will or sense of agency? Because if they're a million years advanced, more advanced, and we think even 30 years more advanced than us currently, it's not clear what the future is. So who knows what one million years in advancement or in development would look like. Of course, they know, just that we don't. Yes, they do. Right, right, right. So do you think that then they could just control us or

abduct Musk or just make him not want to expand or make us not want to expand? So why is it that they allow us to come to these decisions on our own? I mean, plausibly another route, they had two other routes available to them, right? One would be to just exterminate us. That would have definitely, you know, enforce their rule, right? Another would be to just completely control us. Visibly, just directly, like be local, fully in control, just lock down and control us. Those were both options that they chose not to take. What about invisibly control us?

That's probably a lot harder. But if you think that's possible, then you should believe that that's actually happening. But then there's no reason to hang out the edge of visibility, right? So the fact that they're hanging out the edge of visibility suggests maybe they aren't also invisibly controlling us because there wouldn't be much point of the hanging out the edge of visibility if they were just actually invisibly controlling us. Right, right. Well, the reason that we were thinking that there's credence to place on them being actual

aliens hanging out at the edge of visibility was this story that was about wanting to let us be but come to the decision on our own. So it sounds like if they wanted us to not expand, they could also have done that invisibly. So doesn't that have more credence than them hanging out the edge of visibility? I think if you're going to send an expedition to an alien star system and then control the minds of the creatures there, you're going to have to give a lot more capacity to this expedition. That's going to require a lot of capability and a lot of discretionary choices about the people at the end of that expedition. There's a lot of possible aliens who could be constructed a lot of different ways and therefore need a lot of different wings to control them. So in the early 2000s, remember the Discovery Channel?

Yeah. Maybe it's still around. Yeah. I remember watching something about the future and they were saying, at clubs in the future, you'll be ingesting nanoparticles that will make you high in certain ways that will jive with the beat, etc. And they were just thinking 40 years into the future. Right.

Okay, so 1 million years into the future, maybe it's even more than nano, maybe there's something subquantum and you can just get to that realm and you don't even have to control every aspect of it. You don't have to dominate a species. You can just remove their will to expand. So that's what I'm saying. That sounds, I would assign that higher probability than them visibly, at the edge of visibility. You mentioned they might also just respect us in some way. So obviously that has to be part of why they didn't exterminate us.

The simplest strategy would just be to exterminate us, right? Them choosing not to do that shows a certain degree of respect or preference for us to continue in our unique form. Not necessarily, because there could be other reasons for them not exterminating us. Maybe we're just entertaining. They just don't want us to expand, but we're entertaining. Well, then maybe part of our entertainment is that they

haven't controlled us, right? When you go watch a play or a movie, part of the enjoyment is that they haven't controlled this, right? When you go watch a play or a movie, part of the enjoyment is that you don't have to make the movie happen, right? It's happening beyond your control, right? If you have to decide what happens in the play every few minutes, then you won't find it so entertaining to go watch a play, right? So this is so speculative.

What is the number that you assign? Give a probability. These are aliens. Again, I will give a prior of between one and a thousand to one and 10,000. But the likelihood depends on looking at the details of the evidence of particular sightings. I will just say I've looked at some enough to see that they are difficult to explain. They're not easy to dismiss as swamp gas or whatever else it is. But because there are other people who specialize in that, and I am not a specialist,

I feel the right thing to do is for me to say, I will defer to other people's judgments on those things. I will speak more authoritatively on the thing that I'm an expert on, which is the prior. When I was speaking with Tyler Cowen, I was talking to him about priors and saying, well, who sets the initial prior because your priors are set by prior. Then he was saying, well, Kurt,

this was a conversation that I had with Robin, and you, Kurt, are taking the side of Robin because you're referring to priors as things, and I don't think you can refer to them as things. I didn't get into discussion with him on that. But what was he referring to? What did he mean by that? I want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, Huel. Specifically, their black edition ready to drink. So if you're like me, you juggle interviews or researching or work or editing, whatever

else life throws at you, then you've probably had days where you just forget to eat. Or you eat something quickly and then you regret it a couple hours later. That's where Huel has been extremely useful to eat. Or you eat something quickly and then you regret it a couple hours later. That's where Huel has been extremely useful to myself. It's basically fuel. It's a full, nutritionally complete meal in a single bottle. 35 grams of protein, 27 essential vitamins and minerals, and it's low in sugar. I found it especially helpful on recording days so I don't have to think about prepping for food or stepping away to cook. I can just grab something in between conversations

and keep going. It's convenient, it's consistent, it doesn't throw off my rhythm. You may know me, I go with the chocolate flavor. It's simple and it doesn't taste artificial. That's extremely important to me. I was skeptical at first, but it's good enough that I keep coming back to it, especially after the gym. Hey, by the

way, if it's good enough for Idris Elba, it's good enough for me. New customers visit to get 15% off your first order plus a free gift. That's Huelhuel.com slash theories of everything, all one word. Thanks again to Huel for supporting the show, become a Huel again by visiting the link in the description. But what was he referring to? What did he mean by that? I mean, I don't think there's a particular conversation that I refer to there. I agree that Bayesian analysis is an abstraction, an idealization that we project onto our more complicated actual reasoning processes. I still think it is a useful thing to do. So basically, you

inherit a brain that has all these complicated ways it draws inferences. But what you're trying to do is find any biases in it and at least adjust those so that you can make it a more consistent version of the self. So that's some sense of what rationality is always trying to do. You're trying to find a more consistent version of yourself because you believe that more consistent version will more consistently achieve your ends that you desire and so you're not trying to like reform the whole system you're trying to find a way maybe to notice biases or errors in your reasoning and at least reduce those so that's what I would mean

by a prior I would say can you approximate your beliefs on a subject and factor them into a prior and a likelihood in order to produce a posterior? That's an abstraction, but often that makes sense. So here it makes sense, I'd say. Here it makes sense to ask not just what my posterior is, but what my prior and likelihood are. And if I don't have another process that produced them,

then my abstraction process has, you know, only gone so far, but I still think it's useful to do that process. So I would just say, to the extent that you can get your mind to give you these components, then it's worth thinking of those terms. My mind can give me a prior.

So, but what I did is I took this theory of grabby aliens and I used it to generate a prior. I said, my theory, for example, I asked, what's the chance of panspermia siblings? That is, what's the relative chance that we arose through panspermia? And there are independent ways to try to calculate that. And so I might give that a chance of one in 10 or one in 100. And then I might say, what's the chance that a civilization will decide to lock down and not expand? And I say, that's at least one in 10, maybe one in two.

And then I might say, well, what's the chance, given that it decides to lock down and not expand and has a sibling, that it will go there and try to keep them from going? I say, that's almost 90%, of course. And now I'll say, how many strategies do they have to try to convince them to not do it? And I'd say the strategy of being the dominant one who tries to domesticate

the other, I'm going to give that at least a one in three chance. And I multiply these together and that's where I get the one in 10,000. So I'm calculating the prior here by breaking this hypothesis into pieces and asking for a prior for each piece. This is a fundamental mechanism of rationality or analysis as you take overall judgments and you break them into some structure and you estimate parts of the structure and then you use a structured way to put them together. That doesn't mean every piece of the structure has to come from its own structure of recursively onto infinity.

It just means that you've decided that this part of your unconscious analysis is important enough and could have gone wrong easily enough that it's worth doing this explicit check. Do you have a philosophy on truth? Um, it doesn't seem very complicated. So I, you know, some things really are true. You want me to explain? Sure. There are three broad philosophies on truth. One is correspondence that what you say has to correspond to the world somehow to the mind

independent world. Another one is pragmatism that the truth is just what's effective. Something is true if when you use it, it brings utility. And then another form of truth is coherence, the coherence theory of truth. So something is true if it just coheres in a set of ideas. And I was just wondering if you had a particular philosophy of truth. I mean, I think the world actually has truth, I mean, I think the world actually has truths, but I think your mental strategies of forming beliefs could have substantial elements of coherence and correspondence. That is, your mind was structured to be useful to you in drawing inferences.

Part of that is to try to make your inferences correspond to reality, but it's also partly to make your inferences correspond to other people's inferences. So in fact, a fourth theory of truth that you might have mentioned is truth is whatever makes people around you like you. And that's a different pressure on truth. So you really exist, you really have a brain, and this brain really has a process for forming beliefs, but that process has many selection pressures

that contributed to it. So for example, consistency might be overrated in the sense that because people, you'll be embarrassed for people around you to find you inconsistent, you might try harder to be consistent than is actually called for by being close to truth. That's a plausible fact about your minds.

Obviously in some literal sense, consistent things are more possibly true. Inconsistent things just can't be all the way true, but there might be a way which inconsistency is closer to the truth than some modified version of it to make it more consistent just so that you aren't embarrassed by the inconsistency. Right. When I was speaking to Tyler, I was asking him, why is it that people who have access to the same data and are well-intentioned and are intelligent disagree so vehemently on a variety of matters?

And he said this was a deep question that he may have worked on with you. Yes, that's right. But he also said that you both disagreed on that paper itself with interpretation of the paper. I don't know what, I don't remember what Tyler's interpretation was, so I will just speak to mine. There is a set of mathematical analyses of belief where you can take into account your

evidence but also the fact that other people have other opinions. And when you do that analyses, it looks like you should be putting large weight on other people's opinions. So much so that you would not actually knowingly disagree with them. That is, if you and somebody else are both just trying to figure out what's true, but you have different evidence and styles of thoughts, then because you know that other people have different evidence and styles of thinking, and you know that theirs are as likely to be correct as yours,

then you would put huge weights on them. And so as a matter of social fact, you would not knowingly disagree. That is, you might happen to disagree if you independently generated your opinions, but then once you came to know about the other's opinions, you would revise them in order to not disagree. So we humans don't seem to follow this recommendation in this model. We often knowingly disagree. And I've puzzled for a long time about why. So one initial set of hypotheses that seem obviously plausible is that we are proud. And that when we follow somebody else's beliefs and we give them weight, we seem to be deferring to them and in some sense lower status.

So humans often look at social influence as a measure of status. If A influences B, A is higher status than B. So, it does seem like people are often pretty proud and unwilling to defer to other people because of their pride. But I wasn't sure how much of an explanation that was. That was just a partially adequate explanation. In the last five years when I reconsidered the subject I think I've more come to respect the idea that what we want is an integrated mental structure that we can access all the parts and you know and inspect all the parts with. So the problem is if I just put weight on your view and I hear various views this structure in my mind,

which is the weight on view, isn't very well integrated with other things. It's just this little side piece of, oh, he said this. The problem is what we want to have as a mental structure that has a lot of different parts integrated into it, that we can just ask it a question and we get an answer, and trust that it in fact is pretty consistent across the range of things that it's integrated. And we are so in the habit of wanting such structures

that if we have a thing that can't easily be integrated in that structure, we're just not going to rely it on it as much, even if it's just as good an indication of truth. Because we just face this problem of not knowing how to actually integrate a bunch of diverse things. It's actually hard. And so I'm more now put weight on the idea that we really value not just having accurate opinions but having a structure, an integrated structure that can simultaneously produce accurate opinions on a wide range of things and being able to consistently update that structure and use it. your opinions on a wide range of things and being able to consistently update that structure

and use it. And so that structure is already set up to take certain kinds of inputs. So for example, I see something, then that's a certain kind of evidential input and many of my mental structures will be able to integrate a piece of evidence. But the piece of evidence, which is somebody else said something about the subject, that's just, I think, much harder to naturally integrate into our mental structures that represent our beliefs about things because basically we need a model of why they would think that and a model of a different kind of evidence they might have.

And sure, in some mathematical sense, if you went through all of that and worked through it in great detail, eventually you would change your mind a lot integrating that. But it's, I think it's just hard. I think our minds weren't set up for that. Okay, so practically speaking, let's be concrete. Let's imagine there's 10 individuals in this room and they're all experts in something that you're an expert in as well.

So let's say economics and they all disagree. Okay, maybe not vehemently disagree, but they all disagree and you disagree as well. So then what are you going to do? Are you going to concede your belief in favor of just taking a weighted average of theirs? But then if they were to do that, then what happens? So I think, for example, if we're in a committee and we're dying to decide whether to hire

somebody, right? In this case, I might not need to be able to integrate the rest of your opinions on whether to hire this person in order to make the judgment, okay, let's go with the majority opinion here. And so I could just assent to that without understanding it. And I think we often do that. That is, we often as parts of social groups, accept the group's decision without understanding it.

But if we're discussing something and then we're not about to make an immediate decision, I'm going to go off and think about this more and integrate more evidence and maybe in two years finally make a decision. Well, the fact that these people disagreed with me will be a clue about things I should be looking for. But I can't directly integrate it so well. So I will give it less weight than I otherwise could if I could understand it. That is, so in the room I could ask people, why do you think this?

And then if they can explain a reasoning I can understand, I can integrate that into my thinking much more reliably. But there's a choice between either just acting on it directly without understanding it, or understanding it and integrating it, or somehow holding it off in my side of my mind to try to let it influence me when I still don't understand it, those are my realistic options. That third option just is less

effective because there's all these different people who say all these different things and I can't remember them all. The fact of the disagreements, it doesn't make you more uncertain of your initial viewpoint you were putting forward? It should, but it has a limited effect because I don't understand it very well. So I can just raise my general uncertainty on the topic,

but still, if I need specific mental structures to think about things, and without an alternative structure, I'm going to stick with the one I have. I could label it uncertain, but still, like, in general, in evidence or whatever, it's new theories that beat old ones. So if somebody has a theory of something, you say that's wrong, that doesn't actually dislodge it. What you have to do is show them an alternative theory that's more believable, and that's the thing that can dislodge the other theory.

If you don't generate an alternative that's more plausible for them to think in terms of, it's just really hard to get rid of a theory that on the basis of there's some problems with it. Why is that the case? What I mean is in math, you can have an existence or an anti-existence property. There is no number such that so-and-so property holds, but you don't actually have to construct

some alternative theory about numbers. You just say, no, this is false. So you don't construct an alternative theorem. You can just show that the first theorem is false. Mathematics is pretty unusual. So most of our models of the world fit with noise to the world, fit with error. They don't exactly fit the world. So when you show an error, that actually only weighs on the question of how much error in total is there in this model. And unless you have another model with less error, it's still the lowest error model they know of, even if it has more error than they realized before.

Okay. So it's the difference here because you're acting with this model, you're using the model to conduct yourself in the world. So unless someone provides you an alternative, you don't know what to do. Fundamentally, right. You can have the random model of, I should just conduct yourself in the world. So unless someone provides you an alternative, you don't know what to do. Fundamentally, right. You can have the random model of I should just ask randomly in the world. And you might have a model that you think doing better than the random model. And you think, okay, this model has some problems, but it's still better than the random model. So until you give me some other model to work with, I'm going to still use it compared to

the random model. Now speaking of random models, or speaking of randomness, we'll see how this ties in. So, a project I'm passionate about is what are the universities or the academy, what is the university system great at, what is also supposed to be its function, so what is supposed to be great at, and where are its weaknesses, and then also about its weaknesses, how can they be rectified either from within the academy or from without? That's a tough question. Okay, so, academia and universities have a social role in our world. That is, they exist and they are rewarded for existing, so they must be in a local sense providing somebody with something they want.

Right? That's a sort of basic economic factor, right? What is the actual role? Now, they say things about what their role should be and what we should believe about the role and why we should be inspired to support them, but that may not be the actual social role. So we'd want to first identify the actual social role and then maybe ask, how could we move that role more toward the ideal role if we could find it. But our first order of business in

general is to figure out the way the world is and then think about how we might like it to be better. Okay. So, I have a colleague, Brian Kaplan, on the case against education and he says in fact correctly that much of education is signaling for students to show that they are smart and conscientious and conformist, and that employers and many people in the world value that signal, and that's why schools exist to a large part. There is separately research, academia, which isn't all about education, but it's overlapping. I would say, I've thought about this a long time, and I'd say academia's main social role is credentialing impressive associations.

That is, academics are mainly selected for the impressiveness of what they do. When there's peer review articles or choosing for jobs, they aren't usually looking for social impact or how valuable they are to the world. They're looking for how hard that was. And did you meet difficult standards of professional capability? And that's mainly what peer review is judging on,

is how impressive they are. And then many people enjoy associating with those people. And I think they gain prestige by association. So one of the ways people gain prestige in the world is by associating with other prestigious people. So the more direct and strong the prestige association, the more prestige is gained by association. And so I think academics primary role in the world is to be

prestigious and to let other people be prestigious by association. There's something self-fulfilling about that. So for instance- That's what all prestige is. Okay. All prestige is in some sense a self-reinforcing, you know, prestige equilibrium because obviously in some way you would gain prestige by associating with somebody who's prestigious and you can have multiple equilibria, right?

So that's the key point. But you might say, look, you know, this thing has lasted for a while and it has a relatively stable structure, so it doesn't look that random, right? We have different disciplines. So different disciplines have different criteria for prestige, that is different skills you have to show to show that you're a professional there. But there's a lot of correlation and overlap between these different skills. And the three main customers of academia are students

and news media on government and then funders. And they all gain by association with the academics. So students, when they pick a university, they don't pick, gee, where are the, you know, where are the place where the students learn the most? And they don't say, where are the place where the students learn the most? And they don't say, where are the place where the professors contribute in most to world progress or something? They say, where are the most prestigious professors? And they think they will gain, correctly, I think, prestige by association with the professors.

Same way, a journalist wants to have an article with a prestigious person to quote. They will call a prestigious academic to have a quote to put next to whatever they're saying. And they often are seeking those sorts of quotes. And funders, people who pay and fund research, they primarily are not trying to promote intellectual progress or long-term gains for humanity. They mainly want to gain prestige by funding prestigious people. And so they do. So all of these customers of academia are directly getting benefits by paying to associate

with prestigious academics. And the more direct the association, the better it works. So for example, funders could fund via prizes, but that's a longer arms length relationship, which doesn't give them as much prestige. They wanna claim more credit by giving money via grants because grants supposedly shows their good judgment in who they gave a grant to and they have a tighter connection and now they gain more prestige with grants, even though logically prizes are probably a more effective way of funding research.

Oh, is that, so you said probably, is there research on that? Yes, yes, definitely. Well, I would like to explore that later, but. Okay. So we'll put a pin in that. Please continue. We have a whole history to talk about that, absolutely. Right.

So basically, academia talks as if its main product was intellectual progress or insight, you know, collected, saved, and increased and given to the world. But plausibly its main actual product is prestige. And there is a huge demand for prestige, and so they seem to be successfully supplying that demand, and they seem to be very well entrenched. So many people think, oh, now with AI or something else, academia is going to go away, and I go, come on, this has survived a lot more disruptions than you're seeing here. This can survive a lot more in the future. This is going to last. So now notice then the difference between the story

and the actuality is they are pretending and saying they are producing intellectual progress, but they're mainly producing prestige. Now there is a relationship in the sense that intellectual progress can be prestigious, but there are many other things that can be prestigious that might be easier that are not intellectual progress. So basically, if they just produce some area of research or discussion and it's a difficult

area to penetrate, that is, they're using big words and big concepts and equipment and tools and data sets, and they do difficult, impressive things, and then it's hard for other people to do what they do, that's enough to be impressive. It doesn't have to produce progress in order for this to be impressive. So some areas, they may in fact be making progress. They may stumble into an area where in order to be impressive, the main way to be impressive is to produce progress. But there are other areas where they can mostly be impressive by being scholarly, by being

technical, by being knowledgeable, by being very specialized and expert in other things. Can you define what the intellectual progress is? What does progress mean? Right. So, I mean, the thing I've always valued about academic, look, so the world is full of knowledge in the sense that people know how to do things, right? People in a job, people in a profession, they do things and they learn how to do this from other people who did them, right?

So the world knows things and it passes those on from generation to generation, mostly by practice. You learn how to do what somebody else does by sitting next from generation to generation, mostly by practice. You learn how to do what somebody else does by sitting next to them and kind of learning by copying. That's even how grad students learn how to do what professors do, right? Okay, but in addition to all this embodied knowledge in our practice, we have some explicit knowledge, things we can say that are true, and often abstract knowledge, things that

are not just about my particular action in this moment, but abstracted from particulars. And so, academia has long been our host for abstracted, explicit knowledge. And that's where most people go for that sort of thing. They go for it to learn about it in school, they go for it as a quote from a journalist or from a government agency, looking for committee members for some review decision.

When we want explicit abstract knowledge, that's what we've gone to academia for. And it's not the only place where there's explicit abstract knowledge, but it's our main place and especially an integrated world of abstract knowledge and explicit knowledge. So I would say, if you have a question you want to know right now and you've done and you have a basic education, then you can access academia. You can go look up journal articles,

you can look up books, etc. Whatever topic you'd want to learn about, what do we know abstractly, explicitly, you can go learn that stuff relatively quickly and that's the resource that academia has produced over millennia is this source you can go to to learn what we know about abstract topics in an explicit way. So progress is that thing getting bigger, that thing getting better. We know more things, we know it more surely,

we have it in more detail, we have it more abstractly. That is what progress is, is that we are collecting and expanding this world of abstract things we know. Does usefulness factor in? Yes, in the sense that I would think the value of it should be weighted by its usefulness. That is, they aren't all equally weighted. That is, the reason we value this resource of abstract knowledge is that we are going

to use it somehow. Now, part of the use can just be curiosity. That's a kind of use. And we might just be curious about, say, the universe or something, but we're not equally curious about everything in the universe. So it'll still be a relative weight waiting about which things matter most to us. But still, that's the value of academia. To me, that's a grand value.

Knowing things abstractly that we can communicate explicitly to each other and share and pass on generation after generation, that's a wonderful thing. And academia is the place to find that. There's other places in the world that purport to have things like that, but they're just not as good as academia in terms of actually having a resource of abstract explicit knowledge about things. So in that sense, I'm all on board with academia. But then when I look at the microstructure of

academia and I say, are we maximally using our resources to pursue this, not remotely? Okay. Before we get to some of the inefficiencies of academia, or faults even, I want to still linger on the pros of academia. So what is it that academia that, okay, what's the difference between the university system and academia? Because those are used interchangeably. Academia I think would be, if you think of yourself as a researcher, there's all the people who you would be willing to read and to be persuaded by what they said. That's your academia. Not all those people

are universities. You might pick up a journal and the people who publish there aren't at a university. They might be at a research lab. They might be at a think tank. They might be independent, right? But they'd still be part of your intellectual world because they'd be somebody who might persuade you. Okay. But a university is part of that world. But of course, not everybody at a university is an academic. In some sense, there are administrators and

janitors and all sorts of other people at a university. So the knowledge production is academia? I mean, it's not just production. I might read somebody who didn't produce something, but summarized it well or preserved it well. Okay. Right. A textbook, say. Textbook doesn't have to have original insight. It has to contain the insight. So a nonfiction book at a store.

Right. Which wasn't by an academic, maybe a previous academic, quote unquote academic, but an academic, but a university professor reads and then integrates into his or her work. Right. That then instantiates the status of academic. To me it does. That is, yes. If it's world quality level, you know, it's not so much worse that you regret looking at it. Wait, wait, sorry. But then if you're studying the lay people who are supposed to be people

who are outside the academic world and you're gleaning from them, then doesn't that give them status of being academic? Like? What does that mean? Okay. So there's several related concepts here. I was focusing on the concept of the world of conversation, the world of abstract, explicit conversation. And so that's the value I said, I like the value of this thing happening. And I'm pointing to all the people who contribute that value. I see. value," I said, I like the value of this thing happening, and I'm pointing to all the people who contribute that value. Okay? Now, you could have a related concept, which is academic prestige.

And you might say there are people who contribute to the intellectual world who don't have academic prestige, right? And then you might say, well, there's professors have prestige, and then, you know, grad students have less, and, you know, think tank people have less. And you might just, if you could just poll academics who they consider prestigious, they may well decide that some people who are intellectually contributing are not academics, because they just don't count for much prestige.

And that would be another way to raise the concept. Okay, great, this helps me sharpen my question then. What is it that the universities are doing that only they can do and that only they do well? I don't know that there is such a thing. But they are at the moment a package of students and research. They seem to have a niche that others find it hard to spice them from. It's hard to convince students to do something else than go to school where there are prestigious

researchers. And it's hard to convince researchers to go somewhere else than go to school where there are prestigious researchers. And it's hard to convince researchers to go somewhere else except at a school where there are students. So there's clearly a synergy of those two functions. There are several different theories about what that is, but clearly that's the essence of the university. It's the combination of students and researchers and whatever their synergy is. And that's the thing that other people can't seem to displace from. So if I was to include the Institute of Institute for Advanced Study,

that's not a university per se. But what does that fit in? That would just be a broader- Or a research institute, right? So universities are the combination of research groups and teaching institutions. That's fundamentally what a university is. Universities can have many departments that don't do any teaching, but if it was all that,

I wouldn't call it a university, right? So where do you see the universities doing better across time recently and recent like in the past decade? Where do you see them faltering? I can mostly see universities on centuries-long timescale. I can't tell you much about how they're changing in the last decade. But the long-term story is that universities started a few centuries ago, actually. They weren't very common until a few centuries ago.

Until a few centuries ago, most academics, most intellectuals were what they call esoteric, i.e. they were talking to each other and being careful not to say things clearly to the public that might upset authorities. And it's only been in the last few centuries where intellectuals will write in a way that the public could understand and even kings could understand and be offended by and say things to each other in that way and be not so afraid of being crushed by authorities. So that's a new thing in the world. So the esotericism was an actual intent of theirs?

Yes. They basically, you know, back in ancient Greek or Rome or whatever, most intellectuals could talk to each other about, say, not believing in God or, you know, believing in, you know, not believing in various religious things or in the divine right of kings or something, but they couldn't say that out in public. And so they talked to each other in indirect ways that made sure to not be easily read by outsiders. Okay.

And that changed in the last few centuries. That's one of the key distinctive features of the modern world is intellectuals wrote in more plain language that more people can understand, and they were not hiding themselves from each other. And this, of course, allowed multiple disciplines to integrate more easily too. That is, when people are esoteric, they're esoteric to a small community and they could just have different esoteric communities that don't talk to each other. That is, if I have to write in an indirect language, it might be that people in other

disciplines don't understand my indirect language and so different disciplines will just be separate. Is there something special about the professors or the researchers in the academic institutions of the past different than just people who didn't want to voice their opinion about the professors or the researchers in the academic institutions of the past, different than just people who didn't want to voice their opinion about the king or the queen, because there always has been people who have secrets to tell that they're afraid of getting out there. It used to be the norm. It used to be the norm in academic intellectual communities that you wrote esoterically for the people in your particular academic community in ways that ordinary people couldn't understand, that was just the norm, and that norm changed.

Okay. So, that's a big fact about the evolution of universities and academia over the long scale over thousands of years is this big switch. So now, there's a lot more academics than there used to be, a lot more specialized, and a lot more speaking in plain language that many people can understand, and therefore multiple disciplines can understand. So disciplines can now read each other

and try to be polymaths and build on each other because people are speaking more in plain language. And then we've developed more norms. So another thing that happened over these centuries is everything started as philosophy, and then we broke off particular alternative disciplines when each discipline developed its own standards for acceptable topics and methods. So that at the moment leaves philosophy as the leftover category, where they basically have the most simple method left and all the

leftover topics nobody else wanted. And so philosophy is much more diverse than the rest of things. It's analogous to how the world has much more genetic diversity in Africa. Africa is where we all started and when there's a lot of diversity, then people left from Africa and the places where they went to ended up with a lot less diversity because they had small groups that went there. And so the world has around outside of Africa has much less genetic diversity than inside Africa.

And similarly, philosophy just has a lot more intellectual method and style diversity inside philosophy than all the rest of academia. That's an interesting fact about philosophy really. But so basically all these other disciplines collected specialized topics and methods and that didn't used to be two thousands of years ago and so much more specialized now. And another big thing that happened was academia gained control and independence over its outside funders and supporters. So 400 years ago most funding that came from people to academia was either to fund infrastructure like a library or equipment that people could share or prizes.

Prizes were much more common and they were far more common than grants in 1700, 1600, even 1800. And then there was a revolution over the last two centuries whereby academics took more control of academia away from outsiders who previously had tried to keep hold them accountable. So one of the first ways was to move from prizes to grants. So basically, there was these prestigious scientific societies in Paris and London who were getting money in the form of prizes and they would, you know, a big donor would hand a lot of money to a prize and they would, the society would say, we will judge who wins

this prize. And then society said, we don't want that anymore. We want you to give us money and grants that we can hand out on our discretion. If you don't do that, we're not going to put our name on it. And the donors most wanted the name of these societies, so they caved. And then they started giving out money in the form of grants, which then they gave out to their friends, of course. And they had excuses for that.

But basically, it was a way of wresting control of academia from the donors who previously had a more accountable system of prizes. They just say, I want to give this money, but only if the money is, you know, the thing I gave a prize for is actually accomplished. And that's a way for me to make sure that I'm giving money to the thing I want. Whereas if I give it in grants, I'm just saying, hand out money to people, let's hope something good happens.

Which is much, and so that was a first step of academics taking control. And later on we switched to tenure and peer review, both of which were further ways of wresting control of academia from outsiders. And when did that switch happen? So tenure and peer review happened later. You know, basically peer review didn't really become dominant until the mid 20th century

and tenure a bit before. But this world we're familiar with with tenure and peer review and grants is only a world that's been around for 70 years or so. Academia before that was much more accountable to its donors and outsiders. So you think as a whole tenure, peer review, and the grant system has been deleterious to the academic system? Well, it's held them less accountable to outsiders. So it's been good for the academic system and for them,

but it's not been good for the accountability of the system? Right. So I would say plausibly, in fact, they aren't doing as good a research because of their independent lack of accountability. I think it's more clear with Prizes that Prizes was healthier for producing academic progress and also more plausibly for the other two as well. For example, Einstein, most of his publications weren't done by peer review.

They were done by an editor choosing well. Peer review, we have lots of studies in peer review by now that shows that peer review suppresses unusual research, riskier research. It wants more stable, more predictable research. So then why is it that people who are popularizers of science and even scientists will espouse the benefits of peer review, as if that's the only way that you can get great research out? So there's two reasons here.

One is that academics have created excuses or justifications for their choices. And then people believe those excuses or justifications even if they're self-interested. And a related thing is that part of what academia sells to the world isn't just prestige, but it's the aspiration of its prestige. That is, it stands for a grand idea and it stands for that grand idea associated with some other grand ideas about how you achieve grand things. So what we've said about academia is the way to achieve wonderful things in the world of ideas is to find the right people and give them freedom. Except freedom from outsiders, but not from each other.

Basically, we said, as an explicit ideology, that academia, in contrast to most other areas of life, is most productive when it's the most independent from other areas of life. Independent as a group, but not internally. That's just a story we've told. Many people like that idea. It's an attractive idea. How can one overhaul the grant system? What changes should be made?

Well, so now you face the problem. The world has many products, industries that supply products to customers. If you like about shoes or cars, if you thought, I think people should take the bus more often, but they like buying these cars, how can we change the car industry so that they will take the bus more often? You might go, well, you might change the transportation industry,

but the car is a product and the people are using cars are going to want cars, and you can't make them not want cars exactly unless you can offer them an alternative. Right. To into a car, right? So I think for the customers of academia, you'll have to say, well, how can you offer something else that produces the same prestige they want? Right. But has a different actual effect on intellectual progress. So I've thought a lot about this over a long time,

and so I do have a solution, but it's somewhat of a long shot. Does it involve prediction markets? It does. I was speaking with Dan Van Zandt, who's a student here at Florida Atlantic University. He spoke with you a couple of years ago. Dan and I were speaking about how to use the prediction markets to

put forward research. It had to do with betting against ideas. But anyhow, please. Well, maybe it will help them to walk through things that don't work. Great. Okay. So the first thing you might think is, for example, well, let's do prizes again, right? Prize is more effective.

So let's just tell people prizes are more effective and get them to switch. But you see, unfortunately, the people who give out money in grants are gaining more prestige that way. And even though prizes would produce more intellectual progress, that doesn't win for them. They want to gain the prestige of the more direct association that grants give. So you're not actually offering anyone more of what they want when you're trying to introduce a change that would produce more progress. So your problem here is you need to find a way

to give one of these customers something that's more of what they want, not just have a change that would be good for the world. But that's all reform tasks. You know, you have to find that change, okay? Now, so another thing would be you could fund research not just through prizes but through what I call information prizes, which are kind of a way to use prediction markets to fund research.

But again, it faces the same problem. They didn't want to do prizes. Why should they want to do these other sort of prizes? A related example, we have a replication crisis in social sciences and human sciences and the medical sciences. And one solution to the replication crisis is to have prediction markets or surveys even that predict whether submitted papers will replicate. And you could have that be part of the process of approving journal publications. But I was part of a project that was setting up these prediction markets and I tried, I and others tried to go to journals and say, would you be willing to say that you will

look at these prediction market prices as part of your review process for considering journal articles? And we couldn't get any journals to want to do that. That is journals don't want to fix the replication prices. They want to continue to publish sexy papers, and limiting themselves to papers likely to replicate will limit their ability to publish the most sexy papers, and so they don't want to accept that limit. So again, the players in the system are doing what they do in order to gain their personal

advantage, and you can't appeal to their interest in the whole system and the world's progress in order to get them to change these things. Again, that's a lesson. To fix this, you'll have to go more at the core of what somebody wants. But I have a solution. And my solution is based on the following thing. Academia claims that the people it most celebrates, professors at Harvard or whatever, are in fact the people that history

will look back and say, we're the most important researchers on that topic at the time. Academic will not give up on that claim. That's core to their self-image, to their professed role in the world. This is my lever. We could actually create prediction markets on who will be seen as the most important researchers and topics now as seen in a century or two. And then we could force organizations to confront the difference between who they choose and who the markets estimate as the most promising in that regard.

So if we could create prediction markets that were thick enough, reliable that estimate who in the long run will actually seem to be the most important. And then we can see Harvard sociology hires somebody and that person is not ranked in the top 30. Of the available people who the market says are the most promising, then we go to Harvard sociology and say, what, how do you explain this difference? What if they say, well, that just means that the market is ill-informed and idiotic. Right. Now you say, okay,

then why aren't you trading in the market to make the prices more accurate? Don't you have any self-respect? Sure, we have some resources. You have a lot of rich donors. Why don't you get them to trade in the market to make the prices more reflect what you believe? You have all the of rich donors, why don't you get them to trade in the market to make the prices more reflect what you believe? You have all the social influence supposedly.

Why don't you have influence in this market? Obviously, part of what they would do is in fact to go trade in the market in order to make the prices closer to what they believe and many traders will defer to that. That is, they would have substantial influence in doing that. So wait, so what you're saying is if they're wrong, if Harvard is wrong, then Harvard could make money. Sorry, sorry, sorry, not if Harvard is wrong. If the markets are wrong. Right, yeah, if the market price is wrong. It's probably useful right now to outline what a prediction market is because we've been saying this. So the key point is, say in two

centuries, we're going to take all the researchers and feel we're going to rank order them. And that will be the final payoff of some asset. And today, if the price of that asset is different than that final payoff, if you have some inclining in which direction the final payment is off, if you buy and it ends up being higher, you make money. If you sell and it ends up being lower, you make money. And that's the temptation to go trade in these markets. And we can make markets again in the final ranking

of researchers today and in the centuries later about their key research topics. That would be the temptation for Harvard. I mean, when Harvard studies some person, say this person's really good and that what they should do is not only hire that person, they should first go back in these markets to take advantage of the fact

the market's underrating them, right? Then who the other people in the market thinks too high, say, we know we looked at those, those aren't so good, then they should be selling those people. And look, Harvard is very influential and that should have a lot of weight in the market. So I would think a big effect would be in fact,

they would move the markets more to what they believe, but there'd be this other effect. Some people in the markets would say, no, I looked at this person, that person you hired isn't so good. And there would be a difference. And now there would be the question of how to deal with that difference.

And that would be a pressure on them to hire the people the market said is higher. And that would be a way to make what actually matters from academia in the long run, be more influential in academia. That is the force that I posit for good. The force of not wanting to disagree too much with the market that you aren't willing to trade into fix,

instead you will just make your actions differ less from what the market says, not zero, but less. That would push people to actually hire the people, to rate, publish the people who in fact, are more likely to do long-term intellectual progress. Okay, so what's preventing this idea from occurring? So one that occurs to me is that it's too nebulous, who's most important 10 years from now.

What do you mean by most important? I'm sure you have a fix for that though. So the first project that makes sense along the path to making this happen is to take historians now and study some period in the past of one or two centuries and rank the people back then. And you'd want to do that with different groups doing it different ways to show that there is a robust measure, that there is something you're measuring there. That is, if you have different groups using different methods independently rank people in the path and those rankings have no correlation with each other, then yeah, it's meaningless. There is no such thing.

But if there is a substantial correlation in who is ranked higher with different methods, then there is a concept behind that of who is in fact deserves to be ranked higher. And we can use that as the anchor for future predictions. That is, once we've done some of these studies, we can basically do some analysis, factor analysis, of what's the core factor behind these different rankings. And then we could generate a process for which historians we hire how with what procedures to do the ranking.

And we can then say, look, we might do better in the future, but we already have a process that gives a decent ranking. And this is the one that we're tying these bets to. So there's a meaningful sense in which we are betting on the ranking of these people. So that's the first thing you'd want to do is just some projects like that to show that you can do a consistent ranking. I don't think that'll be that hard,

but the point is there are some different ways you can do it and might be interesting. There'll be some disputes about which ways would be better. So for example, I think you get two different metrics if the question is, who was the most influential versus who should have been most influential? Some people might be unfairly neglected. You might look back and say, this person was never very influential, but they should have been. If people had listened to them,

they would have solved these problems sooner and that would have been better. And so I might think that's a better metric to ask who should have been influential, but you can see I'll be a little more work to figure out, maybe a little more noisy to figure out. You have to dig a little deeper, right? Okay. So what do you expect Harvard or whatever prestigious institution you approach with this idea to say?

Well, the person to approach here is somebody who thinks the current system is broken and is willing to put some effort in to try to change it. That's probably not Harvard at the moment. You don't approach Harvard with this. You approach somebody who is somewhat disaffected, who by their personal experience or whatever, has seen in academia not actually maximally pursue progress and is willing to put some resources into trying to fix that. Why is it you say the current system is broken?

So what is this broken? Because all institutions, all places have flaws. So why would, what's the threshold of number of flaws to call something broken? I don't think there's a binary threshold. The point is just we live in a world which doesn't fully coordinate. There are ways in which we could all be better off, but because we're all separately doing things, we don't notice that way and we

haven't coordinated to make it happen. That's true of academia. That is, academia is mostly existed because of local pressures, produce local changes, and just generically, that doesn't produce a global optimum. And so the world can just drift into various kinds of equilibria in different contexts where it's not good for the world, it's just good for each person making their local choices. So that would be the story here is just say, look, academia has drifted into an inefficient

equilibria but not because of a conspiracy theory or somebody tried to make it that way. People were just locally following their incentives and produced the net effect of something that, you know, didn't have it. All innovation's like this, really. Like, all innovation is saying, there's a new way we could do something. You weren't doing it before, not because you were repressing it, it's because you just didn't even realize that there was a better way could do something. You weren't doing it before, not because you were repressing it,

it's because you just didn't even realize that there was a better way to do something. That's all innovation, and so that's the story here. You just didn't realize that there was a better way of doing something. Once you realize it, then you might be able to coordinate to try to achieve it. I guess I was focusing on the word broken.

So if in this case you're saying it's not at a global minimum, or sorry, global maximum. Right? Yeah. That's true of our bodies, that's true of everything. So at what point does something become broken? Or was that just too strong a word, or is it not? I think it's how coordinated do you expect our world to be?

So I do think most of us expect that the failures of coordination we find are going to be modest, even minor, because they expect people have been looking for these failures and trying to fix them. And I think when you actually see the level of dysfunction of the world, you are surprised, offended, and then you might induce the word broken. Just a way to dramatize this is much, much bigger. So for example, I've at times study health economics. In the United States, we spend 18% of GDP on medicine, and we have at least a half dozen

randomized experiments where we give some people more medicine and other people less, and the typical result is no health difference. So plausibly at least half of our medical spending is just a complete waste, 9% of GDP. I'm willing to call that broken. You might have thought, how could this huge society with all these people who specialize in medicine, all these people who specialize in health policy, how could they have not noticed this and advocated for this? How could it be that far off? And it is, and they are hardly noticing or advocating for this. So that's the degree of broken. Basically, policy research is broken to the level that they allow that amount of misspending to continue.

Robin, next time I would love to speak with you on what you're currently obsessed about, which is cultural evolution. And I know we got to get going, but why don't you spend the next five minutes and just outline where is your current thought. Actually, why don't you outline where you were in your thought process on current cultural evolution and where you are now. Okay. So I am a STEM person who waved my hands and rolled my eyes at the word culture, because it seems so vague. And so it's associated with museums and music and

other prestigious things that I just thought were all side deal. And then I started to study fertility and realized we do have a substantial fertility problem. When I looked at the proximate causes to fertility, they were cultural. And it wasn't just one, like a half dozen cultural trends contributing to lower fertility. And I went, oh, so I went and tried to study

what we know about cultural evolution as a general process. And I quickly realized, oh, this is humanity's superpower. This isn't just side to side thing. This is the whole thing. This is what makes humans different from the other animals. And it's really a scarily random process. We trust our culture to give us our values, our norms, and we assume it must come from somewhere.

Many people like to assume that our values and norms are these ancient things that came from DNA evolution over a million years, but most of them are very recent. So we have these cultural values that are very recent. Where do they come from? Nobody designed them. They were just kind of random, which is amazing. You might think, well, how does the world work so well? Okay, we're in an amazing world. I guess cultural evolution is going on amazingly.

But then if you think about, okay, what does cultural evolution require and what's changed in the last few centuries? You go, oh, we have a problem. A few centuries ago, we were in a world of say, 100,000 peasant cultures spread around the world, each with a thousand or so people in it, each at the edge of subsurrival with threatening often by wars and famines and pestilence. So they faced strong selection pressures. When some local culture went bad, it was just replaced by some neighbors. Up until a few centuries ago, the evolution of cultures was strong. And then in the last few centuries, we've somehow ended that process.

We have vastly less variety from 100,000 cultures, we move down to like, you know, maybe 100 or two national cultures, and then we've crushed that down into a single global monoculture. And then selection pressures are vastly weakened. But you might say, look, tech is culture, and if tech is doing right, how come culture isn't doing right? Well, the point is there's two levels of culture. So think about biological species. In biology, there's evolution within a species of the things that can vary within a species. There's evolution of species of the things that are have to

be the same across the species. And it turns out evolution of species means we need a lot lot of small species, whereas evolution in species goes better when we have a few big ones. So now there's a trade-off, which is more important, evolution of species or evolution in species. And it turns out, when we look at our past, where did life come from? It seems like evolution of species mattered more, because the places where life today came from

tend more to be fragmented habitats, rivers, rainforests, coral reefs, because those places have a lot of little species and that mattered more for the evolution of species even though it hurt the evolution in species. So evolution of units matters a lot. And it also seems to be true in corporate culture evolution. In industries with lots of small firms, they tend to have more innovation than industries with a few big firms, which is also because they have more innovation of the corporate

culture relative to in the corporate culture. And so, plausibly, at our macro-cultural level, there's innovation within a macro-culture, which does better when you have a huge macro-culture, which is why we have great evolution of business practices and tech, because those are all things that can vary easily within a macro culture. But terrible evolution of macro cultures, because we've just crushed the variety and got rid of the selection pressures, and increased drift. The people who are the most celebrated heroes in our world are cultural activists who intentionally tried to train cultural values and norms.

But those changes are not plausibly correlated with adaptive pressures. They are just internally generated by the culture, and so from the point of adaption are random walks. So we have a worst case scenario really for the evolution of our culture, and the prediction then is the common features of our culture that we share are drifting away from adaptive regions, including causing low fertility, but many other things going wrong. So even if we fix our fertility problems, we're still going to have this larger maladaptive

cultural drift problem. And it's a really hard problem to fix because it's sort of essential to a civilization, basically. We all love to be part of this world civilization that didn't used to exist. Where we trade all across the world, we communicate all across the world, we share many values across the world, we can vote in the UN and decide things together that we agree together. We love this huge world that we all trade in and communicate in. We're all evolving rapidly within this culture fantastically, but we didn't notice that this

meant we broke the process of cultural evolution, evolution of cultural features. So for example, the high priority we put on education is a global feature. And any one person can deviate by getting less education, but they will just suffer in their personal lives because other people don't respect them as much. And that's the way it's a shared feature of the culture. There aren't people, it's very hard to find a group of people who just, well, we don't care about education in our group, so you can just come here and be fine

if you don't get much education. That doesn't really exist as a thing. So that's the way the entire world is going wrong. Other things, for example, the world has a norm of not only a lot more education, a lot more intensive parenting. The norms over the last century say that parents should be spending a lot more time with their children, a lot more attention to their children,

a lot less crude discipline, but more subtle judgmental discipline, depending on what's been happening lately. That just takes a lot more time and attention. That's part of the contribution to lower fertility, but it's a worldwide norm in the sense that if you decide to pay a lot less attention to your children, when your kids' friends hear about that and report that to the teacher, then you'll be in trouble because you have violated the community norms about how much attention you should be paying to your kids.

You are abusing your kids, they will say, by not paying them the standard amount of attention. Well, let's give a large amount of attention to this next time. Okay, happy to talk again. Great to talk to you. I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free to contact me.

New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there this is content that isn't anywhere else it's not on theories of everything it's not on patreon also full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future several people ask me hey Kurt you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics philosophy and, and consciousness? What are your thoughts?

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