#190 – How can we problem-solve? (two books reviewed: 2 of 2)

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Hello and welcome. My name is Kyle and this is How You Level Up, a podcast that decodes language
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to help you become your best self. Today we ask, how can we problem solve?
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Last episode, we talked about intellectual junk food that functions as an exit from thinking,
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like emergence, a word that fills you up with a feeling of understanding without giving
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you any information. We also looked at good explanations, one that has reach and is hard
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to vary. If the last episode in sum was about how to explain and understand the world, this episode
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is about how we act on our explanations. Let's first hear about a professor. David Deutsch,
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the author of The Beginning of Infinity, sat in a lecture in the 1970s. The professor was
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describing an environmental catastrophe. The professor's argument was, if population growth
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and economic progress continued, the world would be doomed by the 21st century. Resources would
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run out. Collapse was inevitable. After the lecture, Deutsch and a few classmates went up
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and asked the obvious question, what if we solved one of the problems you described in the next year
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or two. The professor's answer? That would only delay the catastrophe. There was no way out.
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Here's what we should notice about this story. The professor is not engaging in critical thinking
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or attempting to solve a problem. This professor is articulating a prophecy. They have stopped
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trying to figure out what to do and started defending a forecast. So the professor's interest
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is no longer about solutions. It's about being right, about the collapse of humanity.
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This professor surely is not stupid or lazy. They were taking up a position. Something we know from
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previous negotiation episodes is positions are not a good idea. He wasn't asking the question,
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how do we solve this? He was positioning himself as, watch how I am right about this.
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Deutsch calls this the absence of active optimism.
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The distinction is that passive optimism says things might get better.
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Active optimism says problems are solvable so I should work on them Let me say that again with a variation Passive optimism is something that happens to you Active optimism is something you do If passive optimism sounds familiar
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similar to how we might debilitate ourselves, you'd be right. There's also a third option,
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of course, which is the one that the professor chose. Pessimism as an identity. Without active
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optimism, without optimism in general, pessimistic predictions are always correct because there's no
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one doing anything about them. The prophecy ends up confirming itself like a closed loop.
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Yudkowsky has a similar concept from map and territory for this called applause lights.
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Like when you're at a live filming of a sitcom or talk show.
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An applause light is a sentence that performs concern without doing any work.
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A few examples for you.
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We need to do something about the price of gas.
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Something must be done about education.
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The housing crisis needs attention.
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applause, and nothing follows. There's no next step. No one is asking what specifically needs
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to happen, who would do it, or how they do it. If you imagined a politician saying any of those
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statements, well, I hope you followed up with some clapping in your mind.
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Applause lights and pessimistic predictions, or inevitability statements, are siblings. One says,
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I care, the other one says it can't be helped. Both are intellectual exits from problem solving.
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Neither of them engage with actual problems. How can you test whether or not a statement
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is applause lights or a pessimistic prediction? After the statement is made, is there a mechanism
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or action for someone to move on? If not, it's another form of junk food, this time for problem
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solving. A good question now to ask, how do the ideas that block problem solving spread through
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a culture? If you're thinking about memetic theory, high five yourself and sit down and
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keep listening. Culture is a set of ideas that people share. These are memes, ideas that travel
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between minds, get copied, and can get modified. Some memes are strong. They resist variation,
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spread and survive. Some are weak and fade in a generation or a lifetime. So when a society
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wants to slow progress, it doesn't need to ban good ideas. It just needs to disable the creativity
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that produces new ideas And there a cultural tool for doing that Deutsch says that it shame Shame teaches conformity for your worldview It teaches imitation without conjecture A line from Deutsch I coming back to is that
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imitation is what an ape or a parrot can do. What makes humans different is that we mix
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imitation with conjecture. And that combination is where creativity comes from.
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Shame cuts the mix.
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You keep the imitation, you lose the conjecture.
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A culture running on shame will repeat itself.
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It can't, and it won't improve.
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And what enables then improvement?
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How can we get out of this shame?
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How can we allow for conjecture to exist again?
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Well, that's criticism.
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Deutsch is very specific about why criticism is necessary.
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Knowledge held immune from criticism can never improve.
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Not because criticism is a nice cultural thing to have.
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It's because error correction is the mechanism for growth and progress.
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For knowledge, general and generational knowledge, to improve, it must correct mistakes in explanations.
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If there is no criticism, there is no correction.
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If there is no correction, there is no growth.
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People who are converging on truth will agree more and more.
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I'm not talking about groupthink.
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You could probably even say people converging on truth is the opposite of groupthink.
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It's what happens when beliefs are connected to reality.
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The map matches the territory.
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They are all subject to examination.
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when the map is so detailed that it is nearly identical to the territory,
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everyone agrees that the map is the same.
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And where does that leave then us?
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Well, the professor in our story at the beginning gave up something specific,
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which was questions.
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He couldn't hold, what if we solved one of these problems in the near future anymore?
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He couldn't hold that question and examine it.
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He had committed to the answer.
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And once you commit to the answer, you stop problem solving.
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Problems are inevitable.
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Problems will always exist.
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Regardless of what you've done before, regardless of what you do now,
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there will be a new problem tomorrow.
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Our only option is to keep solving them.
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Deutsch says that evil in its most fundamental form is a lack of knowledge.
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That knowledge grows through exactly what the professor refused to engage with, which
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is criticism and a willingness to be wrong.
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Deutsch says that evil in its most fundamental form As a brief side journey here democratic societies don enact policies they enact experiments The outcomes are unknown when we vote when a politician provides a framework
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for a plan, and we find out as we go through whether the experiment works or not, there's
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something you can do. If you believe a policy is going to work, come back to that belief after the
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policy is executed. Does your belief align with reality? If so, hopefully you had some good
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explanations that were backing up your belief. And if your belief did not align with reality and the
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policy did not work out, if no, it's time to reassess your explanations and beliefs.
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so what are our takeaways here one when faced with problems there will always be another problem
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what you say and do is either prophesying or problem solving
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identify which one you're currently working with
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prophesying is passive optimism at best and pessimism as an identity at worst
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Problem solving is active optimism
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2. Knowledge held immune from criticism can never improve
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So we must protect the conditions that allow for ideas to be questioned and corrected
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This episode is a dual book review for the two books
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The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch and Map and Territory by Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Both of these books, I thought, were incredible.
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The beginning of Infinity was a long one,
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so I read this one straight through as fast as I could
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in order to keep my momentum high.
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Map and Territory I read slowly, for free,
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on the website LessWrong.
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A link to LessWrong is in the show notes below.
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Because these books were so dense with information,
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and I found that many things overlapped,
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I'm only touching on the few points from the last episode in this episode.
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And I hope that you enjoyed.
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Wishing you a good morning, a good day, or good night.
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him for sharing, and the knowledge unpacked here can be applied to anyone, anywhere, facing
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any challenge.
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If there's a question or topic you'd like me to dive into next, send a note to any of
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my connected social media accounts.
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This is all about how you level up.