Neuroscientist Erik Hoel: Why AI Art Is Counterfeit, Memory vs Documentation, Lab Leak Fallout

Erik Hoel [00:00:00] What AI does is imitate the temp. It's, it's counterfeit art. It's just mimics, but something that purely mimics can't actually do the thing we want out of art, which is to give us something like original and interesting and something that's sort of like in, in a way based on experience.

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] This is Joseph Ring. I'm a cattle feed lot operator in Northern Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we have Eric Huel back on the podcast. Eric is as prolific and insightful as ever, and I'm really excited for you to check it out. We are moving into a new studio. If you are interested in hiring me to interview one of your loved ones about their life experiences, go to store dot Articulate Ventures to find out more about the Legacy Interviews. All right, without further ado, let's head into this interview with Eric Hoel. Eric Hoel, welcome back to the podcast.

Erik Hoel [00:00:56] Thank you so much. Happy to be returning,

Vance Crowe [00:01:00] Man. Your book has caught the world on fire. I, when we first were talking, the book had just come out in like pre-print. And what is the world of being an established, recognized author like for you?

Erik Hoel [00:01:12] Well, I, I, I mean, I would say I sort of have a complex relationship with the publishing industry. I mean, I like, like every big industry, you know, it has its sort of structures that you have to learn, learn how to navigate. And I grew up in an independent bookstore that my mother owned. So I sold books my, my whole life. But lately I've switched to writing online and I, I write a subset called the Intrinsic Perspective. And the, I, I'll just be honest and say that the amount of like immediate feedback and excitement that I get has been vastly greater than a, traditionally than having traditionally published a book, despite the fact that it was a wonderful experience traditionally publishing a book. It's been a year now, paperback is just coming out, you know, it was, I I still receive emails about it from, from people who found it and read it and it's, and are like, I've never read anything like this. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. Are you doing a next one? But in terms of like the pure immediate feedback and, and ease of online writing versus traditional publishing, it means that I think I'm gonna do a lot more online writing in the future.

Vance Crowe [00:02:25] Yeah, there was just so much that a book publishing company used to do for you that now is, is, is unnecessary. Like everything. I was actually just did a legacy interview with a guy that his entire career for 25 years was type setting and then, you know, now all of a sudden you don't really need type setters anymore. And then for a while, the book company's job was to get your ideas out to, to people. But if you're going to get a book deal now you gotta come to the publisher and be like, look, I have 10,000 followers, or I have 5,000 substack subscribers to even get them to, to look at you.

Erik Hoel [00:02:59] Yeah. And I actually have a post coming up breaking down the, the, the, the publishing industry as it currently functions. And one thing to note about it is that it's a number of very hard steps. And so, and the probability of making it past those steps, every one of those steps is, is quite low. And so I think my suspicion is, is that, you know, the majority of even good, what one might just consider publishable manuscripts in, in the United States essentially goes mostly the majority of it is unpublished. And if you look at like numbers, the same thing that's been happening for movies. Like movies are now remakes of remakes. You know, this, everyone sort of has experienced this. But you can actually go and look at the top 10, you know, most grossing movies and check to see if they're part of franchising franchises. And you can really see that it's, it's significantly increasing in liter in literature. There's a similar phenomenon where essentially the rich are getting richer in that it's a very small number of authors now smaller than it's ever been who are making like top 100 bestseller lists. And it's almost always someone who's been there before. And the situation was very different, even in like 1980, if you, if you go back to like 1980, you you'll see that actually a lot of the people making the lists were, were first time authors. So it's been very interesting to sort of get an exposure to that world, like the book did. Well, I, as I said, I, I received notes from, from from readers. I'm very happy with it, but I'm also kind of like, well, you know, I, I'm not sure how this industry is going to kind of keep going and if there's a huge amount of, it just doesn't seem like there's a huge amount of energy in the industry right now.

Erik Hoel [00:04:40] Not that there couldn't be in the future, but it just seems that, that way right now. And to me it seems like a huge amount of the energy is actually gone in, in writing online. And the ease of it and the ease at which you can build an audience and sort of the power of it. You know, at wi wi within six to eight months of writing online, I was be able to like put out a short story, right, which you would think like a short story, right? Like on onto my substack, and I think it ended up getting like 10,000 views or something like that. And that might not sound like that impressive, but for a literary short story to be able to do something like that, for a literary short story. I mean, outside of maybe being published in the New Yorker, that's about as much as you could possibly expect from sort of the traditional literary industry. Again, outside of the very, very big names. And it's like, okay, so, so if that's something that I'm able to build that audience within, you know, six to eight months, it seems as if this is where things are going to inevitably move as sort of market forces come into play and as people read more and more on their phones and that sort of thing.

Vance Crowe [00:05:47] When you go out to buy a book, do you buy it in paperback or you buy a hard copy? Or how do you make the, how do you make the decision?

Erik Hoel [00:05:53] Oh, I, I love buying hard copies because to me, and, and this is why I still see a future in books, I'm not one of those people who thinks the publishing industry is totally doomed or anything like that. You know, to me a book is something that you put into your, into your library and the, the libraries, and not everyone feels this way, but, but I very much feel this way. The library is sort of like an aesthetic object, right? It's almost like an art collection. That doesn't mean that every book has to be like perfectly preserved. Most of my books are quite well read, but you know, they, I I I like getting the hardcover because they have pretty, you know, pretty covers and you can kind of line them up nice and, and so on. So I'm definitely more of a hardcover fan.

Vance Crowe [00:06:35] I was, you know, exclusively paperback when I was younger. So I grew up in a house where my father collected books. He has more books than Thomas Jefferson had at Monticello. So books were everywhere. And to me, they became almost like Chachki esque, like where, whereas just like, there's so many books, this is like an incomprehensible problem to most people. But if you've ever lived in a world where your hallways in your old country farmhouse now have two sets of bookshelves on either side, and you're, you know, a six foot four guy like myself, now all of a sudden the house is very small and the stacks of books are everywhere. So I was always like, I, I want paperback books and here's why, because if I love the book, I wanna be able to easily give it away. Yeah. And if I hate the book, I wanna be easy to throw away. And so like, the value of having like, some long-term thing. But ever since we started this book club, I started realizing like, there's actually some books that I wanna hold on and I wanna hold onto them for a really long time. So I'd rather have a hundred hardback books that I love than thousands and thousands of, of other kinds of books, like soft Back or whatever.

Erik Hoel [00:07:44] Yeah, no, a absolutely. And the book is, you know, books are still just beautiful and gorgeous physical objects. Like, you know, I'm just delighted by the, the job they did with, with, with, with sort of the cover design and, and how gorgeous it looks. And it's also something that like, to be honest, I'm, I'm, I, I, you know, it's like you can get a million readers and that's fine, but like, you can also eventually one day, like my kids will read it, and that to me is like worth like a million readers, right? Because they get an insight onto their dad at like a really deep psychological level that they just would never really have, have access to. So, and I think that that's sort of the power of the physical book is handing down an object like that.

Vance Crowe [00:08:26] Yeah. I feel that deeply with the podcast, that it's, it's actually if I give all of these away, right? The, the podcast makes virtually no money. And, but like now my daughter, if something were to happen to me, as long as she's got access to these files, she can see her dad talking with hundreds of people. And that's just something that like, it's invaluable to me. The, the ability to have captured that and pass it on is, is deeply, deeply valuable. So for a book I think you can imagine that won't just go to my, your children, it could go to your great-grandchildren, right? And still have some relevance to them and have them some insight into what the world was like back when, what was his name? Great-granddad. What Eric?

Erik Hoel [00:09:09] Yeah. Yeah. I think I, I honestly think for all the lamentation around cell phones and so on, the number of the amount of data that kids of this generation will have, particularly kids of, of millennials will have about what their lives were actually like. 'cause, 'cause quite frankly, you don't really remember your childhood. I mean, anyone who really claims they, they really remember their childhood, you know, it's like those memories are very faulty, very easy to manipulate. Sometimes you remember things that people told you that never really happened. And you also, it's also very difficult to kind of figure out what was going on. And I think it becomes easy as you separate from childhood to, to forget that like, generally parents love their kids and you know, and, and, and they have to, 'cause that's, you know, how you can get through a, a, a 3:00 AM wake up, right? And, and most kids are sort of raised in love in that, in that sense, in that there is sort of, there is, there has to be love there in order for the kid to even like survive, right? And, and that's something that's really easy to forget as an adult until you have kids. But, you know, I think for this generation, they're gonna be able to look back and be like, look at all these videos of me, like, look at the stuff that we did, look at all these photos of me, right? And it's just going to, they're gonna have a sense of continuance about themselves that I actually think will be psychologically healthy. I think it's one of the rare cases of technology really seriously adding, adding something in.

Vance Crowe [00:10:44] Oh, that's brilliant. See, because when I think about it, I, I have to resist the urge to try and capture the moments that my daughter has on camera because I find myself then, instead of looking at Violet, I'm looking at my camera.

Erik Hoel [00:10:58] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:10:58] And I find that like, I wanna record everything. But then you think about like, well, how much time will I actually spend going back and looking at these things? And as a parent, you know, you can't even make it to the end of the day, you're lying in bed as you're after your child's asleep and you're looking at photographs from earlier in the day. So who knows? But it's, it's interesting to that you have a positive spin there because it's, my, my natural reaction is this is negative.

Erik Hoel [00:11:21] Yeah. I think it's, I I think it's, you know, o obviously, you know, when you're with the kid, there is always that instinct, but like, I think in the end, particularly for them, it's gonna be something that they, that they treasure. Like getting that, that, that, that info dump. I mean, we just think about it like how, how much delight does the average person get when they're shown a photo of them as a kid? And for like our generation, we get like, you know, some grainy printed out like Polaroid of like, okay, it was me like in a tree. I guess I look pretty happy, you know, it

Vance Crowe [00:11:53] Kinda looks yellowish now. Yeah.

Erik Hoel [00:11:54] Was everybody

Vance Crowe [00:11:55] Yellow?

Erik Hoel [00:11:55] It's faded, but you know, they're gonna get, you know, just like high resolution, really, really good video. And I think that that is actually gonna end up being a, a good thing. I I honestly think it's, it's hard to, it'll be hard to look at your parents when you're 25 and be like, oh, you, you, you know, maybe my childhood wasn't the best or, or whatever, right? And it's like, yeah, but here's like, here's like a thousand videos and in all of them we're having the best time. Right. And I think it's just harder to have that belief.

Vance Crowe [00:12:25] One of the weirdest things about the ubiquity of photographs and these things is like, like I have no video or photographs of my dad crying uncontrollably for a completely irrational reason. Right? So I grew up, and my knowledge of my father was completely rational, entirely stoic. And as far as I know, he has always been this way since the beginning of my existence. Right. Which I don't know anything outside of that, but you also will be able, you know, my violet's going to be able to pass down to her children photos of her or video of just her being completely irrational. And I wonder if that humanizes them or what that does to that relationship because it will be different. You've never been able to do this before.

Erik Hoel [00:13:07] Yeah, I do. I I think it'll be psychologically healthy. I think that there's always this sort of like fog of war that surrounds like human relationships, you know, it's like, and, and, and, and like, and, and it's really, you have a really tough time about like, what was my relationship to my parents actually, like when I was seven years old, right? Like, I have, I have my memories, I have, you know, my, my mother's memories, my father's memories, I have different, you know, different, different stories. Some relatives said different things, right? It's like, so what, what is that? That actually the relationship, right? And this is like this sort of amorphous, very difficult to figure out thing and it allows us to project on our parents sort of masks about of often of how we ourselves feel, right? And, and, and I think that that, that is harder when you just have so much sort of like actual on the ground evidence of what stuff was actually like. And I think it's good. I think humans are, are I, I think humans are very prone to sort of falsification, we're very prone to sort of making up and spinning our own narratives, particularly self-serving narratives. And, you know, the, the treasure trove of videographic evidence will be so vast that I think it's gonna be very hard for someone to, to not understand the, the complexities of life, right? It'll be very hard for somebody to say like, oh, my mother never really, you know, loved me or something like that. It's like, well, here's a thousand videos of her just squealing with light whenever you did anything.

Erik Hoel [00:14:39] So it's like, you know, you, you have to understand that people are multifaceted and I think that that's healthy in the end.

Vance Crowe [00:14:45] So we've been talking about memories, but I think it's actually a, a very interesting thing to ask someone like you, what is a memory?

Erik Hoel [00:14:54] Hmm. That's that Well it's, it is certainly a, a tough question. I mean, I got my PhD in neuroscience and you know, I, I would, I would at varying points sort of ask professors precisely that, right? And for a long time in neuroscience, it was thought that memories were essentially some sort of discreet symbol or, or, or record of an event that was sort of processed perhaps in a way very similar to a, to a modern computer. And this is probably the predominant view throughout even the eighties and nineties and early two thousands. Now we have another analogy in neuroscience, and that analogy is of artificial neural networks, which are, were originally inspired by how the brain functions. So perhaps in a way, thinking about your brain as an artificial neural network is a lot more accurate than thinking about your brain as say a laptop, right? Very, the much more accurate and, and very different. And when we look at artificial neural networks and we look at what memories are, we see that memories are like distributed changes in a vast web of, of very fine grain connectivity. And pinning down where almost anything is, is extremely difficult. Artificial neural networks are notorious for being what's called black boxes in that they, they work, they work very well off often, but no one can really tell you how they work. And that's probably because the input output behavior that they're enacting isn't really compressible in the way that would engender understanding, right?

Erik Hoel [00:16:33] They're not actually just implementing some simple algorithm that you can figure out. They're implementing an algorithm that's as complex as they're now trillions of, of parameters. And the human brain is very similar. We've got trillions of, of parameters. And, and what that means is that pinning down, you know, exactly what, what a memory is or where a memory is in the brain is extremely difficult. I mean, I personally think that neuroscientists perhaps more standard neuroscientists who are still, you know, very interested in things like what's the biological basis of memory as if this is sort of like a really discrete question that we can ask with a discrete answer. I think that they're gonna end up being sorely disappointed. I think memory ends up being very similar to artificial neural network where's sort of distributed across the entirety of the thing. And you know, that's, that's a very, that's

Vance Crowe [00:17:25] I don't

Erik Hoel [00:17:25] Yeah, exactly. It's

Vance Crowe [00:17:26] Very, very fuzzy. Right? So, because if I think about what you're saying, I'm imagining you saying, well, your memory is stored in your brain somewhere in between the connections between things that happened as your memory was forming.

Erik Hoel [00:17:40] Yeah. It's like, it's like, imagine, imagine you have true the, the, the finest interlacing of sort of synaptic branches you can imagine, right? So just this immensely fine, fine complex web and every perception and experience, and at every moment of your life this web is subtly changing, right? Certain, certain sort of points of contact are becoming stronger, denser, other points are sort of lessening and becoming weaker, right? And this is exactly how like an artificial neural network gets, gets trained, right? It, it has a huge number of, of, you know, artificial neurons. And those artificial neurons have connections and those connections grow weaker and stronger depending on how it's how it's being trained. But when you sit down to ask a question like, okay, this is an artificial neural network that, you know, knows what a car is or something like that, if you sit down and you ask where how does it know that, how does it know what a car is? How does a self-driving car know what a car is? That is a very, very tough question to answer. And that's in systems that we have perfect access to, right? Because you can open up the hood of an artificial neural network and you see this dense cluster of connections, but you have perfect access now in the brain. We have terrible access and it's even bigger, right? So, so it's like neuroscientists sort of have sort of like the worst of all possible worlds in that they're dealing with things that are probably, that probably trend towards being fundamentally black boxes and are even more difficult to assess and get a handle on than art like artificial neural networks where we have perfect, we have perfect access.

Erik Hoel [00:19:17] And this is why I think, you know, a lot of neuroscience is, is noise. I, I don't think, I don't think the, the majority of neuroscience will sort of particularly like cognitive neuroscience, not stuff about like how neurons work at the molecular level, but like higher level stuff about how cognition occurs in the brain. That stuff gets continuously rewritten every couple decades. And the reason why is, is, is precisely this.

Vance Crowe [00:19:40] Yeah, I mean you you actually, I was gonna bring up the article that you had talked about, about if you tried to push against the standard understanding of neuroscience, if you took something like depression and you said, ah, I don't think, I think we're over-prescribing that, or we're, we're, we're over diagnosing the number of people that we think have depression and these are the reasons why, and you kind of illuminated just how difficult it would be to push back on standard accepted understandings of psychology. And then that, that kind of cascade on, which was like, you know, if this is, well I'll let you describe it, the, the article, what were you trying to say in that article?

Erik Hoel [00:20:22] Yeah. And, and, and for those who don't know, so this is, this is referring to an essay I wrote recently for my substack, and the essay is called Corporations versus the Demarcation Problem. And the idea is, is that corporations are sort of now getting into the business and now even the government getting into the business of sort of regulating what counts as scientific misinformation. But the, the problem with this is that what counts as scientific misinformation certainly changes over time, and particularly when experts disagree. Like not, you know, random people on the street, but like an actual expert in the field and they strongly disagree with the consensus of their field within science itself. That should be sort of an allowable phenomenon. And differentiating between when expert level criticism is valid or invalid is something called the demarcation problem, which in philosophy is asking what's the difference between pseudoscience and science and all the sort of great minds of, of philosophy Kon structure of scientific revolutions popper with this notion of falsification lactose, kind of, kind of a mix of the two. All these great philosophers never really came up with a very good answer to what counts as pseudoscience versus science and how to adjudicate really fine grain debates. And therefore we should be suspicious of asking if a corpor corporation or a government or like a committee can, can do the same. Because it seems as if they, they have to figure out something that these, some of the great geniuses of the 20th century really couldn't figure out.

Erik Hoel [00:22:01] I mean, unless they take the more lenient route of saying, you know, we'll only go after the really, really bad cases of it. And that's actually something that I, I think is fine, but the issue becomes the, the second you're really talking about, you know, real expert level disagreements where people are citing a lot of research. Right? Then suddenly you're, you're getting very close to this question of demarcation about distinguishing science and non-science.

Vance Crowe [00:22:25] Yeah. And this opened up a lot of concepts for me. So I worked in the biotech industry in the ag biotech, and basically anybody that came up against GMOs or accepted science, we understand how they work. And if you are saying they're not safe, then you're outside of the consensus and likely somebody that is gonna get pushed out of this argument. And you start to think about like, well, how do you have a discussion where the people that believe, let's say in the safety of GMOs, how, how do you create a situation where they're free to be able to explore that they may be wrong without putting the body of work that they've done in jeopardy? Because I felt like when I was at Monsanto, I, I believed that GMOs were safe. I think that the people that were doing the science that, that they were safe, but like to even open that door was such a threat to them and their science and their work that they, the door was just never even cracked open. It was, it would be extremely bad form for people to really entertain those conversations.

Erik Hoel [00:23:33] Yeah. And, and I, I, you know, personally, I I think GMOs are quite safe, but I am, what I don't think should happen is that, you know, powerful entities should essentially, if, if someone came up with like a really detailed, like if someone who was in the industry say broke ranks and came up with like a really detailed high level criticism of it, now maybe this person is totally wrong that that's, that's in fact more than likely, right? That they're totally wrong. But the question is, what do we do with this sort of like scientific monograph, right? That has all the sort of trappings of science, right? It's citing high level sources, it's engaged in, in in depth argumentation, right? And then you have to be like, well, I can distinguish between that scientific monograph and sort of like a correct scientific monograph. And it's like, well under, under sort of what pretext, because you're not doing it off of whether or not this person say, has a PhD in the field, right? That, that that's actually a reasonable criteria, right? If it's, if it's a, if it's a random person on the street screaming that vaccines cause autism and they have absolutely no academic or intellectual background and are not, you know, have no knowledge of the science, then I think we can safely say, okay, this is a very easy case of demarcation. But when we're dealing with cases of, you know, extremely high level expert level criticism, it seems as if you sort of have to have already a priori solve the problem. But of course, the, the issue is, is that these people are criticizing scientific consensus.

Erik Hoel [00:25:04] So you can't simply rely on, well, the scientific consensus goes the other way. It's like, well, but sometimes scientific consensus shifts and sometimes expert experts disagree quite extremely with the consensus of their colleagues. And I, I actually used myself as an example in this essay over a matter that I think is trivial compared to how politicized these debates normally get. And this is that I actually think that a lot of neuroscience, something we were talking about just now is somewhat bunk. I mean, I, I I I think that a lot of neuroscientists are somewhere between just wasting time and like defrauding the public of tax dollars, right? And that's a pretty extreme opinion. Most, most people in the field don't have that. Like I'm, I'm, I'm quite willing to, to say I, I could very well be wrong, but I think it's a, i I think I can, I can argue that, and in fact I'm gonna have a book coming out from Simon and Schuster where I talk a little bit about this at, at some point in the next couple years where, where, where I talk about sort of what neuroscience, what needs to change about neuroscience to get right, and how a lot of neuroscience is not even wrong. Like it's just stuff that's never gonna be reproduced. But that puts me in the position of being directly against scientific consensus. I mean, like, I'm, I'm, it's, I'm directly against the, the scientific consensus. And I think that it would be a mistake to say that some outside forces should sort of adjudicate such disputes, even if no one's suggesting that they are right. I'm certainly not, not claiming that they are. But in terms of sort of like a thought experiment where it seems pretty politically neutral, it seems as if then in this case, almost no one thinks that, you know, like the, the book that I write shouldn't be published or something like that, right?

Erik Hoel [00:26:45] If I'm just critiquing neuroscience, but then the question is just, okay, so to what degree does politicization sort of change your opinion on that? And I think the answer should be, maybe it does, but, but, but not like a complete 180.

Vance Crowe [00:26:57] Well, in your example in that article all, all about depression was actually like I I I spoke with my wife about it at length. So you basically said if you wanted to push back on it, this is the criteria, you know, you'd have to have this level of expertise, you'd have to have these counter examples, you'd have to have tried to lay it out and oh, lo and behold this guy did that, right? Or or the other example like sleep research, you know, seems like this is settled and as soon as people start really breaking into it, maybe not quite as settled as it was before, but there's an entire establishment around people to say, no, we already know what the truth is, and we're not, we're not changing it.

Erik Hoel [00:27:37] Yeah. And I think some of that is that I I I, I think scientists are correct to almost never pay attention to what anyone else in the public thinks about their field. I know that that's like kind of that that's both elitist and, and crazy, but science sort of needs to be self self insulating in that way. But on the other hand, there are plenty of times when scientists themselves within the field, like people who have every expert credential you could ever ask of someone break very significantly, right from the consensus of their colleagues. And I think those are cases like when that is happening, it doesn't mean that that person's correct. In fact, I think most of the time they're wrong and most of the time scientific consensus is correct, but they should absolutely sort of be allowed to make that argument. And also it's, it's very difficult to convince anyone in the sciences of literally anything. It's sort of like steering the discussion on social media or something like that, right? It's like, how difficult is it to steer Twitter? Very difficult, right? Like at most you can sort of nudge it in certain directions if you're, if you're very good and highly engaged, and similarly with science, right? Even if you want to sort of engage and not go to the public engage just at the le at the level of traditional academic discourse, changing anything within science is very difficult. And all you can sort of do is nudge it along in, in what are hopefully the right directions. But so I, so I, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for, for, for people who sort of break with what might be called the expert consensus and sort of make what also might be called an appeal to the public where you say, listen, I don't take these people too seriously.

Erik Hoel [00:29:15] And, and that's exactly what, you know, I'm, I'm planning to do with neuroscience, which luckily I think no one will get mad at and no one will care and there won't be any actual sort of political blowback.

Vance Crowe [00:29:24] Oh, I don't know, man, you're gonna be touching the third. Like I see this go on. So in the registered dietician world or right where you have these like people that say, Hey, we have a license, we understand how this works. But just like neuroscience, I think the science of food and how that all works is ideas stacked on top of ideas stacked on top of ideas, and they're like abstract. And you know, if you looked at any one level, it would, you, you couldn't find any solid answers. And yet when you look at it as a collective, they say, ah, well collectively we know these things. But if you try and go into the RD world and say, even what I've said right there, that, that I think it is about as much of a science as economics is, right? It's just theory upon theory, upon theory that that makes you persona non grata. You're not allowed to be there. And I can't imagine that people that went through to get their PhDs in neuroscience are gonna take this lying down.

Erik Hoel [00:30:18] Yeah, I think, I think you, you know, the, the, the, the more basic the, the, the research gets and the less applied, I think the less sort of like inherently political or angry people get, like no one, no one really cares if someone else is yelling at physicists about strength theory and how it's unfalsifiable, right? It just, it doesn't seem, you know, quite that important. I think where the rubber beats the road is that, you know, a lot of neuroscience bleeds into psychiatry and it bleeds into also like how we conceptualize our ourselves. For, for me, the big dark horse within neuroscience is consciousness. We don't have a good scientific understanding of consciousness. We don't know how the brain generates a stream of, of conscious experience. It seems like the main goal of the brain is to generate a stream of, of conscious experience for most organisms that's certainly what, what what our brains spend most of their time doing. And we simply don't have a good theory of that. And so I think there's a very good case to be made, therefore that neuroscience is pre paradigmatic in a way that say maybe standard, you know, molecular biology is not in that we have sort of, you know, we, we, we, we know how DNA works and how it gets read and, and sort of this, the, the, the broadest level, the broadest outline. We, we have those sort of theories and we have theories like the theory of evolution by natural selection, which explains so much within, within biology itself. But we don't have a good theory of consciousness. And therefore I think there's a very good case to be made, particularly within neuroscience, that it's a pre paradigmatic field and everyone's sort of just running around like a chicken with their head cut off and sort of doing, doing somewhat random things and, and, and, and we sort of have this mess of, of a field as a result.

Vance Crowe [00:32:06] I, I actually, so I had Michael Levin on, which crazily enough we get done with the interview first or second time. And I was like, Michael, you know who you need to meet, you need to meet Eric. Well, I really would suggest that he was like, meet him. I was on the hiring committee at Tufts when to bring him in. I know exactly who he is. And I was like, oh. So one of the things that he really has woken me up to in reading his stuff and, and others is that as a westerner we have this very strong sense that causation happens at whatever the lowest building block is that you can find, like whatever, if, if you can break a molecule down into atoms, and if you can break it atoms down into quirks, and if you can just keep going down, eventually you will reach the bottom. And once you get to the bottom, then you'll be able to figure out the why that constructs all of this. So it's almost like we gotta keep digging down and then once we know that with the furthest down, then we can draw the causation arrow the other direction and his work, and I think you and him have done a lot in this area. I see it, I see these concepts of, of causation showing up in your writing as well is that causation doesn't necessarily happen at the base and it doesn't necessarily happen at the largest macro level. It could be that causation happens somewhere in the middle and goes out in in other directions. Yeah. Talk a little bit about your discoveries of causal emergence and how, how, how one thinks in this way, which it's different than our natural propensity.

Erik Hoel [00:33:35] Yeah. So this, this, this sort of little mini growing subfield has has an interesting history. My, my, my co-authors and I, when I was in graduate school, published the first sort of paper on this, not really the, the very first paper, like in, in the, in the general direction, but in what I think is going to end up being the more accepted answer to, to these questions about reduction and causation and so on, which do have bearings on topics that people care about beyond just, you know, philosophy graduate students, right? This has bearings on things like free will and responsibility for your own actions and things like that. And, you know, originally I wanted to do research into consciousness. And what I found is that consciousness is a incredibly difficult question to make scientific progress on, as in there is a reason we do not have a theory and that it is incredibly hard, I think harder than even the most high level theoretical physics to really make any sort of advance in, in the understanding of consciousness. But we, we had sort of been developing all these mathematical techniques to think about this issue and looking around at other problems. There's this question of emergence. How does emergence occur in physical systems? And this is often sort of related to consciousness, but, but not always. We can think of emergence in, in a totally non-mental way. And we ended up coming up with some math that we thought well described what was going on with, with emergence and countering what might be called the reductionist assumption precisely what you described, which is this idea that if, if we, if we ask sort of what's the actual cause of, say, the next state of the universe or your own behavior, right?

Erik Hoel [00:35:25] But, but, but whichever that answer will be down at the level of the smallest microphysics. So it'll be like, well, listen, we, we had a, a bunch of atoms and they were bumping into one another and, or, or the way function evolved, whatever your final micro physical level is, maybe it's core clouds, maybe it's strengths, but we had a bunch of atoms that they're, they're bouncing against one another. And then, you know, we, as a consequence we have this, this future state. And the idea is, is that well, essentially everything that's happening is happening simply because of this lowest level of description and all the higher levels of description, which we think of like chairs and microphones and, and and paintings and and us ourselves are essentially illusory in that they're, they don't actually have any real causal power. They're what a philosopher might call an epiphenomenon. There's sort of like a shadow or like, you know, the engine coming out of a, the steam coming out of steam engine. And, but it turns out that when you actually do the math on this, it's just not true. You can take a measure of causation and people have advanced a number of measures of causation across, across the years, across the decades. People have come up with mathematical definitions of causation. And you can take those definitions of causation and you can apply them in simple model systems where you understand everything. And what you'll find is that under certain conditions, actually the causation will be greater at a macro scale than a micro scale, even for the exact same event as in like the, the course grain of a system is better at capturing the causation than some fine grain of a system.

Erik Hoel [00:37:06] And this means that reduction and reductionism is not always the best choice for understanding why or how something happened. Instead, we sort, there's sort of like a multi-layered conception wherein generally there's some scale that's more important, some scales are more important than others, but there's no sort of one perfect final scale like the micro scale. And again, we can kind of just show this directly mathematically. And we, we originally published this paper back in 2013 showing this, and we used just one measure of causation, but now it's been shown, you know, because you might say, well, maybe there's something very particular about this one measure of causation. Maybe it has some sort of mathematical assumption behind it that leads to this sort of counterintuitive result. And it turns out no, in fact, pretty much any measure of causation that you look at will give you this result. And, and almost any conceivable measure of causation will give you this result. And the reason why is that causation is essentially the, the inverse of uncertainty and the uncertainty decreases as you go up in scale. And I'll give a very quick example of that. Imagine that we have like Laplace's demon over here who wants to predict what, what, what Vance is going to be doing in 10 hours, right? Or let's say 12 hours, right? What, what, what is Vance gonna be doing, right? And he, he, he gets busy calculating all your, your atoms and exactly how they're gonna move. And he comes up with this huge list of very unlikely transition probabilities where he is like, well, you could be in atomic state, 10,000,000,591, you could be in atomic state, 10,000,000,952, you could be in, right?

Erik Hoel [00:38:46] And imagine this huge list of these possible atomic states that you could be in, in all these tiny little transition probabilities between them, right? But now I come in and I say, okay, but I'm gonna predict, I'm gonna answer your question, but I'm gonna answer it up at a macro level. I'm gonna predict that Vance is gonna be asleep. He's asleep, right? Okay, well what's the probability of my prediction? Let's say you're, you're, you're a pretty normal guy, then the probability of the prediction might be that you're almost certainly gonna be asleep, right? It's like 95% of the time you're asleep by that, by that time of, of night, right? Or 99% of the time or what have you. So what have we done? We've transformed uncertainty into certainty by moving up to a higher level or higher scale of description. And we think that that's what fundamentally underlies this, this sort of common sense notion of emergence. And it's a very sort of powerful argument because it shows both that, that the macro scales of the world, which by the way, most science has to do with macro scales, right? Not microphysics cells are macro scale entities, genes are micro scale entities, right? Scientists talk about as these, about these things all the time as if they have real causal power. And this shows that they do have real causal power and the way that they do it is via this sort of noise reduction. And so in a sense it's sort of like an unsexy answer, which is perfect because I think that if we had like a magic, if we, if the answer was like there's some sort of magic or new laws or something like that, we should be much more skeptical.

Erik Hoel [00:40:17] But this is a much more sort of like, like state answer that's just like, well, it's just about noise reduction and, but, but, but it has a lot of teeth as an argument. I think it's very hard to, to, to get out of. And I'm also gonna be talking about that in, in this, in this upcoming book and about how that sort of Reconceptualize our notion both of science and its drive towards reductionism and also things like free will, not the, not that I think that it's a perfect argument for, for like a knockdown argument for having free will, but I think it has, it pertains to the debate quite significantly.

Vance Crowe [00:40:58] I can see that completely, right? It, it opens up the door to say because the, the, the free will, and I think we've even talked about this in our first discussion about, about how the argument that people make about, well it's either you or it's not you making these decisions, it's one or the other. And just how like overly simplified that explanation that I, I never feel satisfied when somebody says, no, you don't have free will. You're just kind of a, you know, you're just sitting behind the camera lenses watching these things occur, and it's actually just a manifestation of randomness and the way your body is going to react if you put causal, if you can change the causational flow to either go that way or that way it opens up the door to being a more, I may not have a firmer answer on whether or not I have free will, but at least it opens up the space that makes it feel like a more robust discussion.

Erik Hoel [00:41:54] Yeah, there's basically two, well, there there's kind of three, but like, there's basically two arguments against free will. So, so the, the way one should think about it is that everyone has sort of a naive belief that they have free will and are the cause of their own actions. So we should think of, of of free will as like a, a negative thesis. So we should think of it as, okay, well what are the arguments against, against free will? And we should start with those. And those can basically be broken down into two camps, one of which is the could you have done otherwise camp? So it's like, well, could you have done otherwise? Right? And I actually think causal merchants, this theory of causation doesn't have that much to say about that. It, it, maybe it does in like a clever way, but, but I think where it has a much more obvious impact is on the second argument against free will, which is, well you didn't really do anything, it was your atoms that did it, right? You are just sort of, you, you have some micro physical state that micro physical state is doing things and causing the next future states, and that's where all the sort of the causation is. And so therefore you are not really doing anything, right? It's your atoms that are doing things and that's a, that's a, you know, a legitimate sort of argument against, against free will. But what causal merchants shows is that it's un it's probably probably untrue. I mean, I should always, I try to always be careful. This is stuff we show in simple mathematical models. We don't show it in physics, right? So it's like, well this, so it's like this argument against free will doesn't apply in very simple mathematical models depending on some context of how the model actually works.

Erik Hoel [00:43:29] But then the question is, can it actually apply to the real world? If it did, then I think it would, you know, sort of obliterate that particular anti-free will objection. So that's, that's good, right? Like you, you, you knock out one of the legs at least, and at least we can sort of be our, what might be what might be described as sort of the macroscale descriptions, which we ourselves are macroscale descriptions compared to microphysics can be the cause of things and do have sort of real irreducible causal power.

Vance Crowe [00:44:00] I mean the, the biggest challenge with the shaking up the snow globe by saying, Hey, the causation doesn't always start from this reductionist thing, is that then it throws all of the solid answers that you thought you had about the world in, into, into question. And then it becomes very difficult to, like, it's a little bit like adding, you know, a variable in at the end and and and then saying like, okay, now every single equation has to come through with that variable in it. So there is something that feels unsettling about saying causation doesn't run one direction. It could run in multiple directions or for multiple reasons.

Erik Hoel [00:44:39] Yeah, it's, it's, it's more like causation. Doesn't, doesn't automatically occur solely at the, at the micro scale of whatever system you are describing. Ma macro scale, mesoscale level events in the system can have real irreducible causal power that you can't find down at the, at the lower, at the lower level scales, despite the fact that those higher levels are completely derivable from the lower levels, but the causation isn't, right. So, so wi wi within science, the way we should think about that is that actually most of the time in plenty of system architectures, you don't see causal merchants, right? It depends on how much sort of noise there is in your system and how the system is set up. And so actually we, we, what causal merchants says, the theory says is that we should lean towards reductionism. So in general, if you don't know how something is, is working, you should reduce and see if you can sort of take it apart. But it just means that that's not always the winning strategy. In fact, sometimes the sort of the winning strategy in order to understand the causation in the system better is to actually group stuff together and go up the in scale, right? It's just that you basically more things have to go right in order to move up the scale than down the scale. So actually, funnily enough, even despite, you know, so a lot of people don't understand this, but that actually means that causal merchants tells us that we should have an inbuilt preference for reductionism. It's just not always true, right?

Erik Hoel [00:46:10] And I think that that's probably the right answer. Like that, that that seems sort of, sort of right to me, it justifies how reductionist science normally is. But I point out all the time that science is actually not that reductionist. In fact, scientists, what scientists generally do is they find a favorite spatial temporal scale and think about their system at that scale and don't think about stuff below it or above it. And an example of this would be like neuroscientists trying to understand the brain, what do they look at neurons, right? They don't look at quirks, they don't look at atoms, right? They could right. Like you, like, like why stop? Why'd you stop? Well why did you stop there? And and the answer most neurosciences can give is like, I, I don't know, right? But well

Vance Crowe [00:46:52] It's 'cause the human mind can only handle so many details, right? Yeah. It's like

Erik Hoel [00:46:56] Why

Vance Crowe [00:46:56] Does a macro economist decide, say that they're not a micro economist, right? Well it's because if I try and factor in all those things, my brain will explode and then I won't feel like I'm making progress. Which there again comes back to my feeling on rds, which is the, their philosophy is like, yeah, but if we abstracted it into all of these other domains, you know, whether it's chemistry or biochemistry or anatomy or you know, calories like the food chemistry, if I, if I break it out so much, then I, I won't be able to make any progress. And that actually may be what, what keeps them from making true discoveries that are true over time and repeatable is the fact that you aren't looking at it big enough. But you can understand the human frailty element of this, of like, well then maybe that's because the human mind can't handle anymore than what it's already digesting.

Erik Hoel [00:47:49] Yeah. And just to say the, the point you made about, well it would be impossible for us to sort of model the brain say down at the, at the level of atoms. That's absolutely true. But I kind of, I call that like the null model, right? Where wherein it's it all you're actually getting from the higher scale is that like, okay, well it's a compression in theory, if you were unbounded by computational constraints, the best model of the brain would be down at the level of atoms. And that is what the theory of causal emergence says is actually untrue. It there's other benefits than just the compressibility of the system you're looking at. And an example for, for, for neuroscientists might be, again, if we think about where causation is the strongest it might be that the, at the level of causes and effects, at the level of their interventions, they see a lot more bang for their buck up at the level of cells. And if they started to actually find graining, you would actually be moving away from sort of where the causal structure of the brain is, is in focus. And in fact, the theory of causal emergence can take, can be used to find good scales of analysis in complex systems, which is something we really need, particularly for biology, where we don't design these systems ourselves. They operate, who knows exactly how they operate, right? It's very confusing. You might have picked the completely wrong spatial temporal scale to even try to understand this thing at.

Erik Hoel [00:49:22] And that is also what I think happens in biology a lot. And one of the reasons biology is so confusing is that without a good understanding of emergence, without a good scientific theory of emergence, scientists generally just pick some random spatial temporal scale of the system and then sort of analyze that scale. But the problem might be that that scale that you're analyzing maybe causation is, is, is is barely occurring at that scale. The actual causation is occurring at some other scale. And, and, and you're just totally missing it. So anyway, so I think, I think theories of emergence, you know, what I do is I design theories. I mean that's, that's really my job description. Like theories of emergence should have a consequence, they should be useful. They're not just philosophical, they're useful that you have to be able to do something with them.

Vance Crowe [00:50:08] So speaking of your role as trying to come up with these, you know, theories that you had written a piece on mime, which I, you know, I find very interesting. When I first encountered the book, the Selfish Gene by Charles, or not Charles by Richard Dawkins, I remember being completely captured by this, by this description of memes and it was well before it had become a part of popular parlance. And so in his book, Dawkins is saying, let's try and name a discreet idea that, that somebody can have and how that idea can replicate, it can be shared and with other people and it can actually expand. So if I tell five people and then those five people each tell five people how that spreads out, and he made a comparison between memes and genes to be able to say, look, they replicate in the same way they end up having disease issues or, or start having selection pressure. So some that allow you to do things that others didn't allow you, you know, kind of take on the exact same kind of properties. And I thought it was really interesting when you, you came in and you were like, yeah, Dawkins did say this and he coined the term, but this was not a new idea and therein lies this weird thing that's going on that how many ideas do we have that are actually new and not come from somewhere.

Erik Hoel [00:51:32] Yeah, it's, there's a great line I I I like to quote involving this where it's some, you know, Egyptian from like some, some, some ancient Egyptian from like 3000 bc it's like one of the, or maybe like 2000 bc it's like one of the earlier known fragments of writing, but in it they're lamenting that all that is great has already been said and that there's nothing new under the sun and that there's nothing more to add. Right? And like that's how this, you know, scholar felt in like 2,200 BC or something, right? So, you know, this is a very sort of old, old conception. I think you're, you're, you're, you're referencing a piece sort of an exploration I did on my substack about like who, who actually invented this idea of memes. And I think we can give credit for, for, to dawkins, because I do think that we should have somewhat loose conceptions of credit in that who, not just who says it first exactly, but who says it best first, right? So if, if, if, if you are the first person to present an idea in, its sort of convincing totality and you give a very good argument for it based off of, you know, arguments that other people have, have not given, but maybe this idea is somewhat sort of scattered about and you could kind of reconstruct it if you pulled from a bunch of different texts, right? It's like, well no one did pull from a bunch of those different texts. So I've actually gotten, you know, a bit more like, like forgiving to, to thinkers in that. I, I think now we have to, we have to pay attention to sort of the phenotype, not the genotype of ideas, even scientific ideas.

Erik Hoel [00:53:08] And interestingly enough for Dawkins, you know, there is no good evidence for the mimetic theory of, of cultural evolution. I mean, Dawkins sort of speculates about this, but the Journal of Mimetics, I, I think, closed its doors in like early two thousands because it never took off as a science because what's, what's the unit of selection, right? It's not like with genes where you have a very clear unit of selection, you can track it. In fact, when I was in college, I tried to, I, I tried to, to track memes with, with a professor where we, this was before the internet basically, where we passed around like a document and had different classes change it and select which of the parts of the document that they liked or didn't like, you know? And the issue is that we ended up with a cool product, but it's like, what's, what was the unit of selection? Like how, how can we put some math on that? And we, and we, and we couldn't figure it out. And I think memes are the, an idea that's like, it's like kind of true, right? Because of course you literally have the invention of meme culture with actual memes that get changed very much as Dawkins sort of described. But is is it really like the explanation for, for human cultural evolution? I think probably not, but it's a very, it's sort of, it's a perfect thing for a popular science book where like, it's not true in sort of like the ontological like academic way, or at least there's no good proof for it in that sense. But it's sort of like true ish in that it's like a super useful frame for understanding the world and we should sort of weight that highly.

Erik Hoel [00:54:46] Like, it, it's, it's very nice to get a very useful frame, even if it's sort of like not actually precisely true.

Vance Crowe [00:54:54] Yeah. I mean, for me, the, when I had that concept of memes, and I, this was back when I was giving talks to ag groups, and I would, I would stand up and I would put the letters MEME up there and I'd be like, does anybody know how to say this? And they'd be like, meme mes, right? Like this concept of memes in just that short amount of time, it was probably eight years ago that I was doing that. Now if you put that up and asked an audience that they, they would think you were insulting them, they'd be like, what do you mean? Yeah, of course everyone knows this is, this is a meme, but it, it, the power of being able to explain the world through that term is really strong. And it was a little bit earth shaking to me when I was reading your article and you were like, yeah, but dawkins, this, this, this wasn't really necessarily his idea and we can walk back. But then you also like, let this be a, a larger kind of concept, which was where do any ideas come from and what is the value of having credit and publication, you know, for the non-scientist listener, why does credit matter so much to the scientific community and declaring who had what idea and, and kind of what were you pushing back on in, in this regard?

Erik Hoel [00:56:10] Yeah, so it's, it's, it's of supreme importance in the scientific community, the notion of credit. And often for reasons that we don't want to talk about too much, because I think that it reveals the, the humanness of science and the fact that science is just as often driven by ego and the normal drives of human nature as it is by some sort of pristine love of the truth that, you know, goes beyond any monetary compensation, you know, or, or, or anything. It's like, no, like scientists are, are, are, are people, right? They, they try to have a certain code of conduct and uphold certain standards, but they are just people. And you know, I I I think within credit, it's actually something I, I think about a lot and you know, to be honest, I've never found a good solution of it because if you're too strict, then you really do hamper originality. Like, like you, if, if you are too strict about accreditation where you're like, listen, if if if anybody said anything that even kind of sounds like this at any point in history, you have to find them and cite them. And if you don't, you're in trouble. Right? It's like, okay, well if you do that,

Vance Crowe [00:57:22] Which is the experience of grad school, right? You are not, you are not allowed to have unique ideas. If there's any, if there's anything in this review that's your idea, you failed. It's every single idea came from somewhere else and you better have a little footnote that says exactly where it was.

Erik Hoel [00:57:38] Yeah, yeah. That, that, that is often the case. And, and, and, and so when you present anything in science, you're always extremely trepidatious. Like I put out an article called the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis, which is a hypothesis about why, why we dream, why dreaming evolved. And you know, I tried to, to do as much survey of the literature in advancing what, what I still think is basically a novel hypothesis. But, you know, at, at various points people have been like, well, you know, this author from 20 years ago has, you know, a paragraph that kind of looks a lot like that. Like to what degree should we, not that it's at all identical, but if you, like, if you compiled a bunch of like things that other people said at some point, maybe you could kind of stitch it together into something that would, that would resemble this. And I personally think that that's too high of a standard for, for people like I I, you know, in that case, right? I think I have like 200 something citations in that piece, right? It's like I went through the literature as much as humanly possible, and still I missed a couple things that looking back I'm like, yeah, I wish I had kind of cited this, or I wish I had cited that, or something like that. So that's within the sciences, right? And that's within someone spending a huge amount of time doing a huge literature dive into a subject and you still feel like you're missing some things. And so I think we have to, we, we, we have to sort of balance the idea that, you know, that that if, that, if anyone said anything like it, it's, it's not really original with this idea of, well, we, we have to allow for production, we have to allow for con for continuance.

Erik Hoel [00:59:20] And you know, no one has really figured out precisely how to get that balance right. I mean, I think in, in a way, we all make our own decisions. I've seen some academics go after other academics for plagiarizing them, but the plagiarism, you know, it's, it's not at the level of the sentence, it's, it's sort of at the level of ideas, but only if you're sort of magnanimous, you know, the, your degree of, of how magnanimous you are determines to what degree you think that this is, is plagiarism. And I've seen this happen. And so in the end, I know, I mean, I think we make, we make our own decisions about, about this, and it's always very tough. It's always very tough.

Vance Crowe [01:00:01] What do you think of the current state of the scientific publishing right now?

Erik Hoel [01:00:08] Yeah, I I I think it's, it's the, the, the people in it are generally very good hearted people. The structure of the system is quite poor. I mean, it's extremely expensive to publish an article. It's hard to publish an article. I've, I have some articles that will never be published because I just gave up. And it's always because there's some reviewer who's like, they're not even like, this is wrong. They're like, I wanna see this. And you're like, but I didn't do that. I did this other thing and I can't, this all happened like two years ago. I don't remember the code that, well, the amount of work it's gonna take for me to go in and, and, and make this like, change that doesn't affect the results or doesn't, you know, affect the thesis. It's just what you wanna see. That amount of work is so vast that it's like not even worth it for me anymore. I think the best thing to happen to science recently has been preprints where you can put up a paper cheaply by yourself hosted and sort of get feedback on it. That's not like reviewers who are kind of making this like thumbs up, thumbs down decision, but just like feedback from the community on it. And, and honestly, some of the best science occurs via preprints. And this is before peer review, right? Like, so it's, it's, it's, it's sort of, it's sort of shown me that, you know, it maybe in some sort of ideal future there, I think there'll always be a place for peer review, but I'm not, I don't think of it as sort of like the secret sauce of science anymore, just due to the success of, of preprints.

Vance Crowe [01:01:45] One of the ideas that you put forward that I think is a little bit counter-cultural, at least to my audience, is that you think that the lab leak hypothesis with COVID is only 40% likely, meaning that you think that the, the 60% hypothesis is that it is a zoonotic event. It happened in the wet market or something like that. How did you come to those, those numbers?

Erik Hoel [01:02:08] Well, well you're, you're also, you know, this is, this is not, it's not like something I've done a deep dive on, right? This is, I think that, I think that that number is in a footnote in a recent essay of mine. So, so very good eyes, you know, to to, to me, I, I want to be clear that I have absolutely no idea. Anyone who claims that they have a good idea of what those probabilities are is mistaken. They don't. If you, if you think it's ninety ten one way or another, I think that you are wrong. So regardless of which way you think it goes, if you think it's 90 10, it's not 90 10. There's, there's, it, it, it could legitimately be either. And if you look at the early emails, I, vanity Fair did a huge piece on this where they looked at fauci emails with a bunch of other people. You have a bunch of top scientists starting out thinking that a lab leak is, is more likely even those very same people who later came out and said that that was misinformation. And, and so I think certainly it, it could have gone other way. The, the reason why I am, I lean more towards the natural is that I, I read a paper recently that was doing a lot of modeling work on origin points that sort of pinpointed the, the, the wuhan wet market, but it's all modeling, right? So it's, it's, it's sort of, it's, it's sort of like as, as someone who has built very large scale models of the thalamic cortical system of the mammalian brain, you can get a model to do anything you want, right?

Erik Hoel [01:03:41] Like I could have, I could have gotten my supposedly biologically realistic set of neurons to sort of, you know, spell out, you know, a name or something, right? Like it was just completely non biologically realistic things with only very small tweaking of the parameters. So, so big modeling work is really, really tough. And so at, at this point, that's all we have. So it was just because I thought that that paper was somewhat convincing that sort of maybe update from like 60 40 the other way to, to, to swap them. But

Vance Crowe [01:04:12] Yeah, for me it, it's, it's just been very interesting because the people that have a different opinion than the lab leak have like this 90 10 split. And I also know people in the lab, so I had Alina Chan on, I've had Matt Ridley on who wrote books about this, like, so, you know, and I can definitely be swept up in the, in the vast, you know, the Dunning Kruger effect where I'm like, oh, I read this book and now I know a few names and therefore I'm going to take this explanation given to me, and I'm going to put that on the 90 10. I was actually just glad to see somebody putting out an idea that said, ah, I'm, I don't know, I'm 60% confident in this idea because it does seem like all of the ideas are, I'm 95% confident, I'm 99% confident, and I'm with you. When you have that confidence level, you better have a smoking gun. Otherwise, I tend to want the opposite of whatever it is that you think. Yeah,

Erik Hoel [01:05:04] I mean, to to, to be honest, one thing I am still, and one thing, one of the reasons why I do have talked about the lab leak on my substack, I was one of the first, the second, the second that Facebook lift lifted their lab leak hypothesis kind of embargo. And the second I thought that it was safe for me to even post something, I wrote a post called Publish and Perish, and it was about virology and about the likelihood of a lab leak. And that even if, even if, even if it ended up not being true, the fact that it could have been a lab leak, like very reasonably could have been a lab leak, should mean that we should be incredibly litigious. And on it with contemporary vir virology, contemporary virology is a danger. It is, is a very serious danger. And because, 'cause this easily could have been a lab leak and, and, but, but, but you know, I I came up with that post like literally like a couple weeks after it seems, you know, okay to talk about it online and that I was sure that my, my Twitter wouldn't get, and I, in the post, I don't even say, you know, this is, this is for sure true, right? Like, I I say like, I literally could be, could go either way. But it, that decision I think will haunt the scientific establishment for a generation, the decision to say that it's illegal to discuss that this could have come from a lab when, when ver the very top scientists right from the beginning were saying that it was possible.

Erik Hoel [01:06:38] And I think that that will haunt us for a generation because it really severed like public trust, trust in institutions. And I think like reasonably so, like I I, there there was just e even as I said, I actually no longer think it, it more likely than not came from a lab, I think the other way. But the fact that it was outlawed for more than a year to even say that was absurd. And, you know, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:07:06] And then we, and you end up missing the woods through the trees, which is even if it wasn't a lab leak, the fact that it was so, it likely could have been, there's, it's so easy and now the entire world knows, hey, these bad things can happen. Existential risk can happen when you think not only that you're doing everything right and you think you're doing everything safe, but you even potentially think I'm doing good by doing this. And I, I read in a, I think a, in a different piece, when you made the concept, you brought up the point of a lab leak for artificial intelligence. And that actually smacked me in the face because I, up until this point had been like, oh, artificial intelligence getting out and getting us all, that's kind of like one of those, I'm a non-expert. It's easy for me to feel that there's danger in that in the same way that somebody's a non-expert in GMOs might be like, well, think about this crazy thing that could happen with GMOs. And you're like, yeah, but the likelihood that that's gonna happen is so low, it's not real. But when you did the lab leak hypothesis for ai, I was like, oh, I can feel the way that I did about the virus leaking out and now I can see this in AI and it makes me question it in a different way. I thought it was very important that you brought that up.

Erik Hoel [01:08:18] Yeah. Th thank you. I mean, I I I never expected in my life, you know, in, let's see, I was in, I was in college in the mid two thousands. Never would've suspected in my life that we would have AI at the level that we have now. The recent, the recent progress in the last two, particularly just two years. Just two years.

Vance Crowe [01:08:43] Just the art alone in the last year. Yeah.

Erik Hoel [01:08:45] Yep. Exactly. Just Dolly,

Vance Crowe [01:08:47] When Deep Dream first came out, I was like, I don't even know what the hell this, who cares what this is? Yeah.

Erik Hoel [01:08:52] But

Vance Crowe [01:08:52] Now you look at it and you're like, this is going to completely change the world. PE this is no, no question.

Erik Hoel [01:08:57] People don't, I mean the, the hu the the Human Go Champion, I think his name is Lee Sol, I'm probably mispronouncing that he was beaten by maybe Alpha Go, I forget the title of it, but he was beaten at Go only in 2016, I think. So two, two in 2016, there were still like computer games with simple rules that AI couldn't beat humans in. Now an AI can beat a human in any game with any simple rules. Like, for, for for sure. I, I think may maybe a, a couple instances of stuff like poker where there's bluffing that can occur that has been difficult, but they, they're, they're figuring that out now. And you know, the, the,

Vance Crowe [01:09:45] I was even trying to think of complicated ones, right? Like a World of Warcraft, right? But

Erik Hoel [01:09:49] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:09:49] You could play it with an AI that has the intuitive language understanding that would just, just wipe the floor with that.

Erik Hoel [01:09:55] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, they did it with StarCraft, which is a

Vance Crowe [01:09:58] Quite,

Erik Hoel [01:09:58] Quite a complex game. I haven't played the, the new StarCraft, but I played the original StarCraft when I was a kid. And like, it's quite a complex game and the, the AI now will wipe the floor with the best players, and it's just because there's data available and people felt like doing it. They could do it with anything. I mean, anything that there's data available for, and I, I think people are one, are sort of unprepared for this world. I'm gonna be having a piece coming out in two weeks about AI art, arguing that AI art is, is not art. Like this is, we are dumb primates and, and AI art is the equivalent of like a, a rock that looks like a face, right? Like you could find a rock in nature that sort of looks like a face. In fact, there's a museum in Japan that collects rocks that look like faces, and they're, you know, you just need two holes and like a line, and they all look kind kind of funny and they all look like a face, right? But there are no faces in the rocks, right? It's a, it's, it was not put there by, in tension or design. There was no consciousness behind the design of this. Similarly, a i art is just, it's just faces and rocks. But that, and, and, and, and that's kind of terrifying that in the future. That's

Vance Crowe [01:11:13] Pretty bold.

Erik Hoel [01:11:13] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:11:13] I Are you sure? Like, I mean, no, for me, my perspective is that as long as you have somebody putting together a creation of words like the, a city of the undead, well then AI can come back with something that does not look like faces in rocks. It looks like a city of the undead that somebody would've taken the time to paint. And and are you saying, because there's a human edition into that, by, by creating that phrase

Erik Hoel [01:11:41] That makes it not art? No, I, I I think it would be, it would be absurd. Like it would be absurd to say, for example, if I commission an artist, right? And, and for my substack, I, I don't directly commission him. He, he basically takes a proceed of the total amount of the substack, like a collaborator. But I, I have an artist who's a my resonant artist for the Substack,

Vance Crowe [01:12:05] And he does great. The brain massaging one sticks out.

Erik Hoel [01:12:08] Yeah, he does. He, he's, he's like brilliant. Like, I have no idea how I lucked into him. He's so good. And he does these artistic reactions to the drafts. But you know, when, when he's making the art, he is consciously thinking about something, right? So the, the, the result is that the, the transmission, if we think about art as like a transmission, right? There's a communication between what he was thinking about in his own consciousness and the recipient of the art, right? It's, it's imbued with this, what I would never say is that I am the real artist because, you know, I, I, I said, well, what if we did what, what if we did a City of the Dead for one of these pieces? And he's like, okay, I'll think about it. And then he thinks about it and he does all these things, and then he comes back with this. Then I say, look at this amazing art that I made, right? This is incredible. I'm such a good artist. You'd be like, you're, you're, you're outta your mind. Like he, he's the actual artist, right? And I think given the minimal amount of input and the ease by which you can prompt these things, I think you're effectively an artist as a commissioner, right? Which most people would laugh at, right? If, if someone was going out and commissioning artists and then, and then just giving them one sentence descriptions of what they wanted and then saying, look at all these paintings I made, right? Look at these beautiful hall of paintings I made. You'd be like, you're, you're kind of, you're, you're, you're missing something really important here, right? Which is that you didn't make any of these paintings. And, and, and I think that, you know, Wal Walter Benjamin has this great essay called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, or, or maybe I'm, I'm, I'm reversing some of the words in the title there, but this is supposed to be the update of that where, you know, in mechanical reproduction, we really did lose something when it, when it comes to art, we lost sort of the originality of it, right?

Erik Hoel [01:13:55] It's like, like there's a sense in which the Mona Lisa is sort of lessened with every Mona Lisa postcard, right? It's like, it's like the image just, just becomes, it loses its aura of ath authenticity and originality. And here what we're actually doing is severing art, severing art from conscious experience. So there's no consciousness behind any of this. This is, it's like unconscious art, right? It's like a, it's like some, someone had a, a, an epileptic fit and wasn't conscious and sketched something would be the equivalent. And I think that there's kind of a horror to that if, if you're using it to replace artists. Now, if artists start using it as sort of like a, like a more complex paintbrush where they're sort of testing out ideas and they're in this like, relationship with it and the thing maybe can't do everything. Like it's, it still needs like a lot of the fine details or, or, or basically it's just there to sort of be like an assistant, then you're in a totally different world. But if you're just, if if this stuff gets so good that I can just ask for, for, for, for something and it gives me back a hundred amazing things and I just pick out one, then I think that there's a deep sense in which that's, that's sort of like the death, death of art. It's certainly the death of human art. And, and, and, and we shouldn't pretend that it, that it's not huge corporations that is doing this, right? It's like you haven't replaced, it's not, it's not an ai, right? Like it's Microsoft, right? Like that, that's who you're replacing the, the, the artist with.

Vance Crowe [01:15:22] So I, there's something in the, in the original description of what you're saying that I really react negatively to, but I think it's probably a definitional issue because my mentor, the one that really taught me about art, used to talk, well he still does. He, he talks about like, one art is something that makes you feel something. So the recipient doesn't need to know what message the art, the artist was necessarily sending you just, you're, you're in front of it, whether it's a sculpture or a painting. And, and just recently, Alex Do and I, who's an artist did, did a podcast in vr. And you can tell that if you're not really standing in front of Mona Lisa or the, the Monet's lilies, it's not the same even though it's just as big in this VR space, or it's just as vibrant colors. It's not the same. But there's another side of it that Pete was always pushing me on was to say, he was always saying he still does make friends with artists. Artists can see things about culture before other people can, that's why they're there. They're perceiving things that you either can't be put into words or can't be transmitted in a normal frequency. And if that's what you're saying about what you lose, there's this like severing of that connection. I completely agree with it, but, but it's hard for me because as the subject or like as, as the subjective experience, as I'm looking at art, I can easily feel something that the AI put there because it's a resting, it captures my attention.

Vance Crowe [01:16:54] It's got, yeah.

Erik Hoel [01:16:55] Nudity

Vance Crowe [01:16:55] Or it's, you know, there's something about that. But I see the severing of the relationship between the artist as harbinger of the future or, or you know, somebody understanding what's going on in the current moment.

Erik Hoel [01:17:07] So I think it's actually both. And I think the thing that you experience is basically the illusion of art. So as a simple example, right? There are plenty of things that make us feel things that we wouldn't describe as art, even things that are quite beautiful, right? If, if, if you saw a, a photo of the planet Saturn right? You, and you said, that's beautiful, that'd be correct. But if you were like, that's art one could say you're, you, you, you're saying something that could kind of be true. But we're implicitly thinking about some sort of intentionality. Like, like, oh, it's art. Like who, who made Saturn? Or what were sort of the teleological laws that led to Saturn being so beautiful? You seem to be basically implying that when you say something like that, or if you say this cloud is art or something like that, you could say, you're, you're emphasizing how beautiful it is. But if there's really no difference between art and beauty, then we don't even need the term art, right? We can just throw it aside, right? And, and we should be very wary about, about the definitions of words that are so broad that we end up not that, that word not being used or not being meaningful 'cause it's just the same as some other word. But then it's like, well, why did we have this word? It seems like we have it for a good reason. And what Tol story has is a modification of this. He has a modification to this principle where it is like the artist experiences something and then creates art, and that art goes out and infects other people with that experience, or maybe almost like a mimetic modification of that experience. So it's like almost like the artist as a contagion of what a philosopher would call quaia, where the artist experiences something and then it affects you, and then that it goes on to affect other, other people.

Erik Hoel [01:18:48] But in AI art, it's totally one way. So it's, it's not actually spreading. It's like, it's almost like a false consciousness. And I think that that does have functional effects, and I think it will have functional effects on, on art. There's something in, in movies called Imitating the Temp. And Imitating the temp is something that happens in the soundtrack of movies where it's, it's one of the reasons why movies sound so bad now often, which is that when the director first makes the cut in the movie, they take music from other movies and they put it into the movie. So like, they would take the movie, they have a, a soaring scene that's, that's very high emotion. So they take a clip from Gladiator and they put it to gladiator music, right? And they do this, right? And this is how they do the first cut of the movie. And then what happens is, is that the director grows really attached to the temp, the temporary score and tells the composer, imitate the temp, make me something that's as close to it to possible. And that's why movies often, that's why like Jurassic Park sounded so good and so different, and now stuff just doesn't really sound that way, right? It's not distinctive, it's so just bland. And that's how you get these sort of scores through imitation tol story called this Counterfeit Art, which was just, IM imitative art, right? And that's the worst instinct as an art artist is to imitate, like, don't imitate. And that's what art schools teach you, which is why Tulsa hated art schools. And I think that what AI does is imitate the temp.

Erik Hoel [01:20:22] It's, it's counterfeit art. It's just mimics, but something that purely mimics can't actually do the thing we want out of art, which is to give us something like original and interesting and something that's sort of like in, in a way based on experience. And, and so I think, and, and it, the worst thing that might happen in my view, the worst case scenario, and I'm not saying this will happen, but worst case scenario is that AI art replaces a lot of working artists. And you sort of like have the same problem that you have with index funds, which is that if everyone's buying index funds and index funds are supposed to reflect the market, how can the market be accurate, right? Because Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:21:02] Exactly. That's how I feel about index funds. And I see your point, right? Right. Like if, if, if you have a bunch of people playing the tempo, which I mean, you already have this in pop music, right? There's a whole lot of of computer generated pop music that gives you the beat. Maybe if you have the, like, you know, high notes and low notes and then somebody just comes in and mad libs through it and you can see that they're like, I don't go to pop music to go find any inspiration anymore. I wonder if I would naturally just 'cause I'm older. I, I I see your point. And I think that the biggest challenge about art is the demarcation problem. And we're all the way back at the beginning where we started, which is that, that thing of like, if I say, well, it's something that arrests you, it's something that makes you feel something, you can say, oh, okay, well then how would you distinguish that somewhere else? But as soon as I start to draw that line, then, then we start arguing over that line as opposed to the wider thing. And I think that this, this argument over AI and art will cause very serious complications between people because the demarcation problem will be even fiercer than it is in science. It prob probably wider and, and because it's so hard and so subjective. Yeah,

Erik Hoel [01:22:16] Absolutely. I mean, this is not something that I need everyone on earth to agree with me about, but I think that it's a really necessary opinion to, to get out there because I think that there is a huge risk from, frankly these corporations automating a away human, human creativity. And I think the worst thing is not, it, it's much more likely that in that bad scenario, what happens is, is is just that we get a lot of really sort of like mediocre lukewarm art and we sort of drive out all the working artists and we end up with that. Not that we get this like super intelligent, amazing art that the ai, you know, is creating, I think what it's gonna be like, well, you know, I could either pay a real artist and get something and it'll be really good or I can, you know, pay Microsoft five bucks a month and get unlimited art and it's like mediocre, counterfeit, lukewarm art. But you know, it's five bucks a month and I get as much as I want. And that to me is the more like, kind of likely like ba bad scenario. And you know, I, I think that people who work in AI very consistently are doing things that are really going to reshape our reality and they have almost no oversight. And they also I think have, have, have, have sort of like the culture and, and morality all sort of on their side. And I think that if you work on ai, you should be mu feel much more like a nuclear physicist or something, right? Where it's like you can be a nuclear physicist, right? But if you go to build atomic bombs, don't expect everyone to agree with what you're doing.

Erik Hoel [01:23:51] Like what you're doing is so morally laden, right? And that's how I feel about AI is that we should, we should view this as a deeply morally laden and risky enterprise. And the people who get into it and do it shouldn't just be like applauded endlessly for every little thing that they do in the way that the culture in my opinion, frankly does right now. I think that they should be interrogated and they should be like, like put on the calls of like, is what you're doing actually good? Because what you're doing is unleashing unleashing forces that are massive in scope and consequence

Vance Crowe [01:24:25] And well, but as a regular person, I mean, most people never encounter anyone that, I mean, you're in kind of a rare air world, right? You know, people that are doing GPT three, same as I do, actually, viewers of the podcast would absolutely know people that work on, on a people ai, like people like Ken Stanley and Yoshi Bach is in this world. But it's hard to imagine having Yeah. In our culture, applying any sort of negative label to people that are, that are doing a job. Yeah. It's, we don't really have that. It's,

Erik Hoel [01:24:55] Well, well, but I think we, we we do have it, right, we do. Like I was just talking about virology being very dangerous, right? Like, as I said, like if you're building nukes for the, for the US government, you should probably expect a lot of people to disagree with, with how you're using that technology, right? Like that is super reasonable, even if you think maybe there's some reason to have nukes, right? Like even if you think that it's super reasonable to say that people should expect like some blowback for, for what they're doing, they're not doing a a morally neutral thing. They're doing something that's really morally laden. And so far with ai, we don't have that. Everyone is basically still in the applauding phase and eventually that applauding phase will, will end, hopefully. And that doesn't mean that we should stop all AI research or all AI research researchers are bad people. That's absolutely not what I'm saying. But, but I do think that there needs to be sort of like a, hey, what's, what's gonna be the place for humans here? And maybe you should be really careful about what you, what you create here. And I, I mean that both from a cultural perspective, but also from an existential perspective, there's a lot of very smart people who, as you say, are concerned about the existential risk that comes from these technologies. And I think that that should be taken very, very seriously. And right now, sometimes it gets the feeling of like a, it's sometimes it can be like a bunch of rich kids with a bunch of money playing around, right? Not they're grown up rich kids, but like a bunch of people who are now, you know, effectively billionaires putting a bunch of money into this space, and people sort of have unlimited funds and everyone's applauding and it's like, we, we need to have a different take on AI by the time that this stuff gets dangerous.

Erik Hoel [01:26:35] We need to have a much more skeptical, a much more hard nosed take on AI by the time the stuff really gets, gets kicked off.

Vance Crowe [01:26:43] Yeah. And maybe have the dune approach where you just, it not only does everybody just askew it, but it's not even talked about. It's just like, Hey, we didn't, we don't allow this.

Erik Hoel [01:26:50] That's my solution. But I, I don't, I've, I've tried to, to pitch that and you know, not that many people are willing to go along with it, but maybe to some degree

Vance Crowe [01:26:58] You just had a son and he is nearing on a year old. How are you planning to educate this young, this young lad?

Erik Hoel [01:27:06] Great question. I, I originally, I myself went to public school. It was not a great experience. I learned nothing, but,

Vance Crowe [01:27:18] But you can't say you learned nothing. You're at Tufts University of a PhD and you're all, you know, like

Erik Hoel [01:27:23] I I, I was very lucky in that I grew up in my mother's independent bookstore. So I had a massive advantage in that sense, but like an educational advantage. But I, I really firmly believe that almost everything I I, I know or talk about, I learned mostly outside the structures of academia, right? I learned from reading books or reading papers or, or somewhere like the more high level academic stuff, like going to conferences or doing journal clubs together or stuff like that. But that's, that's very unusual and very like high level stuff. It's not sort of part of standard academia. And my opinions on this, I've, I've, I've sort of become maybe slightly more and more radical over time, particularly because I, I recently wrote a piece called Why we Stopped making Einstein on the Decline of Genius in our Modern Times, which I do think that there's, there's at least good anecdotal and then like a little bit of data based evidence that we just don't have sort of the great geniuses of the past anymore. Maybe that's because ideas are getting harder to find. I certainly think that ideas are getting harder to find. But also I think that there have been changes to the nature of education and one of those changes is the decline of the aristocracy and the way that the aristocrats used to educate their, their children, which was mainly through hiring private tutors who would come and live with the child and effectively educate them for hours one-on-one. And it's the ideal learning environment to have governess and from, from when you're very young to be privately tutored, you know, until you're 15 and you go off to, to college then, and by the way, the college systems at those times, there was, there was entire decades where there were no lectures at Cambridge University or Oxford University, it was all tutors.

Erik Hoel [01:29:09] So it was all one-on-one learning even in the colleges. And we simply don't have that anymore. And one reason we don't have it is that it's deeply inequitable, right? I mean it's, it's, it's insanely inequitable. This was, this was something that was reserved for the very rich and most of the great sort of minds throughout history were people who were raised in this, in, in aristocratic manner. I mean, like, certainly I think it could be argued the majority of them before maybe about 1800 or so on, were, were raised in this manner. But there's, there's almost no one who's becoming a really high level intellectual in the 16 hundreds who doesn't have some sort of, you know, aristocratic background like let's say in France. And, you know, the, this, this decline of one-on-one tutoring, which we know from studies to be the most effective method of education in a sense. We've solved education, we know, like education researchers, we know what is the most effective, we have the studies to prove it. It's one-on-one tutoring, but it's an unacceptable answer because it's so unequal, right? Like you can't go into, you know, inner cities and, and, and, and, and educate everyone via one-on-one tutoring, right? Like, there's just no money for that. So, so everyone sort of has to search for other answers. But if we take that answer seriously, that then we should think that, you know, there there is a sense in which we know what the ideal learning environment is, and now that everything is moving online and, and that those sort of forces in our, in our society are much more prevalent.

Erik Hoel [01:30:43] I used to be quite sure that all my kids would, you know, go through sort of the normal school system and now I'm much less less sure and, and think, well maybe there's some sort of cheap contemporary way to do something like aristocratic tutoring with kids and, and give them sort of a structured environment. And I'm not saying that everyone should do this or needs to do this for, for, for any reason, but I think it's something that I've, I've become much more interested in just literally since writing this, this, this essay, this article, exploring this hypothesis.

Vance Crowe [01:31:12] Yeah, I mean, I have found your, your point on the private tutors to be deeply insightful. So I have been deep diving into everything from Waldorf schools to Montessori. I've toured so many schools in the St. Louis area, like way, way, way beyond what a normal parent probably should. And in large part it's not because I'm like, oh, I, I only want the best for my daughter. Of course I, I do. But my curiosity has been like, just to your point, and I had not taken it to the distance of getting to a private tour was, you know, all the research shows it doesn't really matter what you do here because the, they're all, the outcomes are all the same and they're all the same, whether you're doing the European system or the US system and the,

Erik Hoel [01:31:59] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:31:59] And so I have been boggled, like my mind has been baffled by this, and I certainly have types of schools that I like better than others, but it had never crossed my mind one-on-one. I, I have toyed with and even approached teachers to say, how much would it cost for you to do three students? And I'm just gonna have you like, do like these micro pods because for the amount we spend per student in the United States on education, it can't be that far away

Erik Hoel [01:32:27] Yeah. From

Vance Crowe [01:32:28] Individual private tutors.

Erik Hoel [01:32:30] Yeah. That's, that's the crazy thing is that, you know, depending on sort of how it's, how it's set up, it's if, if you think about, well, private school is 60,000 a year now,

Vance Crowe [01:32:41] Right?

Erik Hoel [01:32:41] Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:32:41] If you're lucky.

Erik Hoel [01:32:42] If you're lucky now if you're lucky. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, okay, so that's a, that's a salary. Now if it's 70, 80,000 a year, I think I just saw Northwestern University was 82 now for it's tuition. So private school tends to kind of mirror college. So, so maybe some private schools are up in the eighties at this point. That's, you know, that's a sal that's a salary. I, I have no idea to what degree I'm, I'm actually gonna do this or, or how this is, this is, this is gonna be done. But I really think that of, of all the generations to attempt it, I think my generation is a good one because we've finally moved to doing so much online. And even like the work from home shift that has occurred during COVID and the education from home that's been occurring, I, I think that now is the time to maybe try something some, a little bit more of a, of a radical experiment and, you know, and I also think like, you know, looking back in, in an ideal case, like that's, that's how, how many of us would like to have been raised, right? Like in this sort of ideal fantasy of having a governess, beautiful governess teaches you languages from a young age, right? And then like some hotshot, you know, young, young tutor, oftentimes these were very famous people like Bertrand Russell's tutors, many of them were, were quite famous. Some were like the, you know, the graduate student of Lord Kelvin right. And things like that. And, and you know, that that is, I, I do think that there's very good historical evidence that that's the ideal learning environment, but it's just very hard to replicate nowadays.

Vance Crowe [01:34:20] And when you think about things like television for your son, how much screen time has your son had in, in total? Any idea

Erik Hoel [01:34:28] So far? None. Except sometimes when I'll, I'll have something on and he realizes that I have something on and he like comes over and I, he's definitely seen the TV on, you know, he sees us on laptops and computers, right? There's no way sort of around that. He certainly doesn't have his own devices and won't for a very long time if I have anything to say about it. But, so I don't think that, just like seeing the TV does any, there's certainly, there's no good evidence that just, you know, having, having, having a TV on occasionally in the background, if they're not just like sitting there watching, it really does anything to them. I, I, I'm very concerned about it because I think that you, you know, that that period of time, particularly as you get older in like maybe six to to 10 in terms of the amount of imaginative play that children should be getting should be very high. We know that that imaginative play correlates to like anything, everything good you can, you can think of, right? So the more, the more imaginative play that kids get, the the better. So I actually don't think that screens themselves are that negative. I think it's more so that it replaces other time. So, so, so if I had to guess, you know, my, my guess would be that a lot of, some of the negative effective screens comes from just simply replacing time or the kid would be doing, you know, imaginative play somewhere else by themself.

Vance Crowe [01:35:55] Yeah. The, the best. So Violet has seen virtually no screens other than like whatever she incidentally sees, but like, we've never even watched TV around her. I don't watch that much TV to begin with. But, but the, the thing that I have observed is that she demands to go outside all the time. And I think a lot of parents, like when we've had friends over, or even family like Violet, it could be like sleeting outside cold and wet and like she has no knowledge that that's not what she wants to do. So if we'll put a coat on her and let her go outside, that she is like every ounce of, of, of soul in her is pushing to get outside. And I think that that's been the biggest benefit from not having tv is there's no, she doesn't use her, her limited little girl. Like, I'm gonna make demands power to get the TV on. She uses it to go outside and that seems to be like a, a cycle. And, and I think that that's, you know, for me it's less about is she gonna get addicted to it or any of those things. It's that I don't want her to want Yeah.

Erik Hoel [01:37:02] To see

Vance Crowe [01:37:03] What's on there. And that's been the most important thing. Yeah,

Erik Hoel [01:37:06] I've, I've, like, my, my suspicion is like, 'cause sometimes I'll, I'll look over it and he is like looking up what I'm doing, but he almost always gets bored and looks away because I'm like typing something, you know? And it's just, it's just not actually that interesting. I don't think just seeing like the light from the screen is gonna do anything. And then also, and in fact I have an essay coming up on this, on the intrinsic perspective, one thing that I've actually gotten into recently in terms of, you know, occasionally having something on in the background is, is eSports, which I think are very interesting. I was never into eSports before this. These

Vance Crowe [01:37:43] Are people playing video

Erik Hoel [01:37:44] Games, people playing video games professionally. There is a whole universe. I didn't even, I discovered it like last year. I was like, what is happening here? There's like casters, there are teams, people get signed, there's like drama about, you know, who's the, who's the best. It, it, it's exactly the same as the regular sports world. But what I like about it is that, is that most of the people who do it are also sort of personalities and you actually get to know them a lot better than sort of like the blank faced players who you never really get to know well for regular sports. Like, I don't think any of us really even know Tom Brady. Well, despite the fact that he's the most famous sports figure. I mean, I, I think we would all sort of be shocked if we privately spoke to Tom Brady and he would, he would come off as very different. But that, that's very untrue for this eSports world. But my point being here is that in eSports, it's not like a talking head, right? It's like someone playing a, like a computer game or something. And so they like kids just, they, they, they can't even see anything interesting in it. They don't even look at it like, because, because it's not, if it's, if it's a head, like if it you put on CNN, if you put it on CN even the youngest baby will be like, what is this huge talking head, you know, that's, that's in front of me.

Vance Crowe [01:38:55] Yeah. Faces, I mean, kid

Erik Hoel [01:38:56] Kids

Vance Crowe [01:38:57] Are just so surprised faces,

Erik Hoel [01:38:57] But if it's like little figures, you know, moving around on they, they're like, whatever, I'm done with this. I'm going somewhere else.

Vance Crowe [01:39:03] Yeah. So

Erik Hoel [01:39:04] Little secret to watch sports is that you can, you can't watch regular sports, but you can watch eSports because they'll, they'll just get so bored of it.

Vance Crowe [01:39:11] My my observation is that Violet is now, she's 22 months, so almost two years. And I was just telling my producer Ben Anderson, like one of the great joys about parenting that nobody tells you about is the moment when your child sees something that you didn't notice. And we've had a couple of experiences, like the other day she starts yelling Turkey, Turkey, Turkey. And I was like, what are you talking about? And I look outside, there's a wild Turkey in our yard, right? And so like, you're like, okay, she saw that I was looking outside at the same time and couldn't see it. And, and this morning she saw a turtle and like, I don't know that I have ever found a turtle out

Erik Hoel [01:39:52] In the wild. And

Vance Crowe [01:39:54] She's like, Hey, look in here, this is a turtle. And for me, like there's something truly i, I don't like human that you couldn't experience. If you've never been around a child that you raised from nothing, you knew that she did not have the word for turtle before we taught it to her, expose it to her. And then she found a turtle. There's like a circle to this whole thing that is impossible to explain to other people. You can only experience it.

Erik Hoel [01:40:24] Yeah. There, there's no greater, there's a famous philosophy of mind thought, experiment called Mary the color scientist. And in the thought experiment, it's a neuroscientist named Mary who knows everything about color vision, but has been raised in a black and white Rome. And the question is, does she know what seeing color is like? Because she knows all the physical facts about the brain that involve color vision. So if, if the physical facts of the brain determine the color experience, then she should understand color. But does she learn anything new? Is she like, oh wow, that's red right now. I've now I've seen red for the first time. And the intuition is, is that she does experience color for the first time and has like a reaction to it and that it's, that's not covered, right? So it's this, it's an anti materialist argument, but in general, the difference between experiencing something and then having sort of like heard about it, right? There's that gap. And I think parenting is one of the biggest, one of those, the, the places where that gap is the largest where you just, you ha you, you basically, you experience it, but it's so actually difficult to put into words and to express it. And you would think that that is absurd. You would think that everyone has a good understanding of what it means to be a parent because we've had so long to tell people about it and to communicate with it. And every single person is like, oh, this was like so much more sort of like interesting and evocative and there's all sorts of stuff in here that I wasn't expecting at all. And it's like, okay, so clearly we're just sort of dumb primates. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:41:49] Well, and I, so this goes along with a, with a game that I play with Violet, so very, so very early age. I, I have a, like an acute sense of smell. I can like read a recipe and you can add spices in and I can accumulate what those spices will taste like, but I'm not sure I can evoke the smell of something. And so I knew I have this plant called a Korean spice of I burnum, which is this beautiful smelling plant and it's got two different smells and the front end of the smell, it's like perfume. And in the back end of the smell is like a spice, like nutmeg or, or cinnamon or something like that. So it's two different, like, and before the flowers came in, I was trying to explain to Violet way beyond, you know, words that she could use. Can I put a smell into words such that she would not be surprised by how it smelled? And this has been a wonderful exercise because it has forced me to, you know, like it's very difficult to backwards engineer a smell. Yeah. Like what does it smell like, right? I can only give you analogies just like, oh it tastes like chicken, right? Like, and then to be able to put that into words and then to like see her experience these things, it's been a very, it's almost like meditation where you're like, I know I can't get there, but the act of trying is probably the most valuable part of it.

Erik Hoel [01:43:12] Yeah, that's that's great. I love that exercise.

Vance Crowe [01:43:16] So Eric, well you are the most prolific writer. I know. I'm sure you have a thousand things to do today. I'm so excited that you took the time to come read it. If people wanted to read your substack, find out more about you, where would they go to do that?

Erik Hoel [01:43:30] Yeah, so if you, if you just type in Eric Hoel, E-R-I-K-H-O-E-L into Google, my substack should be one of the first results. It's called the intrinsic perspective. It's the best way to, to stay in touch with me is g It is also a great community OO over there. And I also don't bug people. I put out one essay a week, so you get one email a week and I really try to respect people's time and, and only put out sort of stuff I'm really confident in. So that's, that's how you can find me.

Vance Crowe [01:44:00] It's brilliant stuff. Any of the articles we've talked about today or any of the forthcoming ones that come out there? I have never read anything that I have not been like, huh, that's an interesting, oh, that's surprising. I, I find it a wonderful thing to grapple with. So Eric, thank you so much for your time and we'll have you back on soon.

Erik Hoel [01:44:17] Thank you so much, fans. It's been a pleasure.