Joscha Bach @plinz AI researcher on religion, autism, sci-fi books and parenting.

Joscha Bach [00:00:00] I think that the stories right now that we tell our children the need that exist for our children do not depict our universe very well. They're not truthful, and they basically make our children very vulnerable to indoctrination with ideas that are not true, that manipulate our children into things that are not in their best interest and that them away from getting agency over their beliefs and ultimately their identity.

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] I'm Nicholas Barlett, co-owner of the World's first Popcorn Board Game Cafe, living in Fulton, Missouri, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. Yosha Bach Returns longtime listeners of the podcast will remember that I had yosha on when COVID was just kicking off and we were talking about how he knew it was coming long before most of society had the belief that Coronavirus was a real thing, let alone that it was gonna turn into a global pandemic, but this conversation was completely different than that one. We go into all kinds of things like why do people believe the things that they do? What happens if you have a child and you don't teach them the religion of their parents? Is there now a void there? Why is it that people are taking on ideas of astrology? Where did autism start to increase in society and what implications does that have for people that are facing autism? We also got into some really amazing book reviews about some science fiction books that everyone knows about Dune Foundation and the three Body problem. And then even at the end, we had a really good conversation about some extraordinary cartoon or anime movies that parents and kids would love to watch together that are BA based on an entirely different premise than almost all Western movies. So sit back and enjoy. In the last couple of weeks I've been preparing for the holiday season and doing these Legacy Interviews.

Vance Crowe [00:01:59] This is where I sit down with a loved one, usually somebody a little bit older in their late sixties, early seventies to talk about their legacy that they're leaving behind. We talk for 60 to 90 minutes. I do them either over Zoom or if you're here in St. Louis, you can come to the studio and we have a conversation that's worth recording and sharing with future generations. I've done dozens and dozens of these at this point and it is an amazing experience where oftentimes people at the end will tell me, I was able to tell you stories that I've wanted to tell my wife or my children for many, many years, but it was never the right context or never the right chance. And so they're grateful for the opportunity to have these conversations. If you're interested in learning more about these Legacy Interviews, go to store Articulate Ventures and check it out and book yourself a legacy interview with me as the interviewer, either for yourself or one of your loved ones. Alright, now without further ado, let's go to our interview with Yosha Bach. Yosha Bach, welcome back to the podcast.

Joscha Bach [00:03:06] Thank you. Thank you. V, it's nice to see you again.

Vance Crowe [00:03:09] You know, last time I saw you, we were in the very beginning of CVID and nobody really knew what it was gonna be like to live in a global pandemic in a modern age where there's internet and you know, giant mechanisms where you can spread information around and people can spread. Now since that time, it still seems like the world is in a moment of chaos and it's just very excited and and almost dangerous. Is that because that is human's perspective, it always feels this way, or is there something truly special about this moment?

Joscha Bach [00:03:45] I think what's special is two things. One, we have more information about the ground truth than ever because of the interconnectedness of the world and the pandemic started, we basically had all our private life costs of the internet with a situation on the ground in China if you were interested in this. So social media, and now we can see the failure of coordination in real time on money levels, but also the progress that is being made and the discussion that takes place in the background. So there basically many Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups and chat rooms where you can join the fray and argue both with lay people and with scientists who follow the situation on the ground and know about the new mutations and new data, discuss the studies and so on. So basically the circle of people who is privy to the latest developments is much, much larger than before. On the other hand, it also feels as if we are more helpless than ever before because our coordination is not working at the same level as it was working, for instance, during the fight against a smallpox or during the Spanish flu.

Vance Crowe [00:04:52] Why do you think that our coordination is so much less effective than in the past?

Joscha Bach [00:04:58] I think that's because on the way our society has evolved, I suspect that when World War II was over and we had a mutually assured equilibrium of destruction, it meant that there was an existential threat removed from our society and this existential threat, the sense that we could be failing has led to a different type of model for reality and has led to different form of administration. It's similar to what happens in the management of a very large company. When a company is started at first, everything that is being done is about survival and administration will be about the survival of that company and often the company itself will be instrumental to something outside of the company. For instance, when Google was started, it was built to give the world's knowledge of to people, to organize it, to collect it. There were a number of moonshots programs like Google Books and Google Earth and so on, that in a way changed the world. It was not just the search engine because search engines, engines all already existed and advertising was an business model that came in after a few years and became dominant, but it was not, I think the main thing that Google intended to do. And after Google became very large and too big to fail and the original generation of founders had moved out of the executive positions, the incentives of Google changed. And Google is now mostly about Google, about its own macrocosm, and the administration of Google is about how to get into the administration position and how to keep it.

Joscha Bach [00:06:38] So the incentives are very different. And if you look at the world of at large, then Google is not seeing itself as an organ within this world. Google is I think making a very deliberate effort to be a good citizen in the world, but it's no longer seeing itself as instrumental to organizing the world's knowledge in the best possible way or to achieve a GI or to build orbital cities. As was on the bucket list of the founders. That seems like the same thing happens in the US, right? So yes, it's not seeing itself as an instrument to go to the moon or to go to outer space anymore or to go bring humanity into the future. It's no longer a project, it's no longer an attempt to put the western world onto a new civilizational foundation. It is something that is muddling through and the incentives of administration also to muddle through to get in power to stay there in a situation where nobody has a plan,

Vance Crowe [00:07:33] Is that in part because we don't really have some excited vision, you know, I guess since Elon Musk came out and he's like, Hey, I think we should do a colony on Mars. But there was a time when it was like, Hey, we want to get to the moon and oh no, the Russians are getting out into space ahead of us. Is it a fact that you both need a competitor and you need a vision or is that just an overly simplistic model to understand the past?

Joscha Bach [00:07:58] I suspect that when the US was founded, there was an exciting mission. There were was a bunch of Freemasons and a few other power centers who sat together and decided to break free of the mother land of England and to build their own thing and how to pull that off. So there were conspiracies, there were intrigue, there were, there was the attempt to create a new world order and later on there were attempts to build a new American century and so on. And these projects were sometimes hubristic and sometimes they worked out. Whenever there is something like a romantic mission where you think you need to change the course of history to produce a certain thing like Napoleon did when he's attacked Europe or as Jka did, bad things can happen. It's, it's a really terrible thing if somebody has this mission and the mission is succeeding in, in a way that burns down a lot of things and burns down more than it creates. But sometimes these creation events are wildfires that are creating room for something new. It just takes generations for the old stuff to come back. And I suspect that we see these wildfires in these political wildfires in many countries historically, like for instance, Stalin and Russia and they, the Soviet Union or Mao and China were down in a amazing amount of culture or also Hitler in Germany. And in a way the US hadn't had this wildfire yet.

Joscha Bach [00:09:29] And there is a possibility that somebody with a vision comes to power. And I'm a little bit afraid of that because what happens if the US has its Mao moment or its big authoritarian vision moment where somebody states democracy isn't cutting it and we feel that we are unable to coordinate within the existing democracy. All the institutions are captured by local shortsighted, short game interests and what can we do about this? We need to give this country a shared purpose and we need to get rid of all those that stand in the way of that, right? This is something that I'm not looking forward to, but it's definitely something I think that can happen in the next couple generations.

Vance Crowe [00:10:13] Do you think it is an inevitable part of just human civilization?

Joscha Bach [00:10:19] I don't know that, so I'm not sure if I believe in some kind of historic determinism. I think that human civilization is a form of evolutionary organization. There is no heart boundary between natural evolution and the sociocultural evolution of humanity. It's just something that happens and things survive or not. And sometimes you get into a point where you have an local state where you basically overgraze your territory and your population breaks down again and you start to lower rung again. That can happen and that has happened in the past. So we saw these civilizational cycles. But in part that's also because what comes up has come down and if society is not built explicitly for sustainability, like some for instance Chinese empires were, which aimed for building a stable W which limited innovation in such a way that it was not disrupting the way in which society worked, then the society is going to be more innovative, they're going to be burst, they're going to be collapses. And some of these collapses might be small and some might be big.

Vance Crowe [00:11:28] Yeah, I think I've heard you say on another podcast about how making, making the observation that capitalism is inherently a a destructive force, right? It raises things up and then it crashes down. And I think people living like myself that have been in a capitalist system our whole lives have almost no perception of that. It seems like it's just a natural function of the world. But to hear you say the Chinese culture in the past was thinking about sustainability, it it, what do you think of that? Like do you think that you, in order to have a civilization that's sustainable, it can't be capitalistic then because capitalism requires so much destructive innovation?

Joscha Bach [00:12:08] I don't think that capitalism in a sense is an invention that somebody has created and then implemented on the world. I think that capitalism might be something like the natural organization of a technological society in the same way as feudalism might be the natural organization of an agricultural society. And the agricultural society, the primary means of production is land and that, and money is something that needs to be reinvented from time to time to even out the books because the monetary systems usually are not entirely sustainable. And the more land you control, the more power you have and eventually the hierarchy of control will be a hierarchy of the control of the lands, right? This is, that is what feudalism is about. And now agricultural production only makes up for a very small faction of the GDP. And as a result it's only a very small part of the power that you can wield. And so the control of the physical real estate is not that on its face the most important thing. What seems to be important is the control over technology and the control over technology changes with the creation of new technology. So it's basically about fungibility. It's about making technology developable and tradable and insulating the ownership over the technology and over the progress and over these new developments to some degree from the political administration because you want the political administration to be stable. And unlike in feudalism where the king is also the owner of the land and not an employee, the administrator of a democratic society is an employee, right?

Joscha Bach [00:13:50] It's somebody who draws a salary, somebody who can be fired and you, if you don't like their performance, you can fire them. There are various processes for that and implement the next one in a peaceful way. And the administration is behold to rules. The administration has to play by rules that limit its action much, much more than it did for medieval rulers. So the actual freedom for the nominally most powerful people in our societies are relatively small. And maybe that's a good thing because it, if you have more degrees of freedom, it creates more ways of producing mayhem. The question is whether the incentives are still right and the government is can be incentivized to act on the goals of our societies and our civilization.

Vance Crowe [00:14:35] When you look at different civilizations, like right now, you know, it's in our lifetime it switched from, we have to worry about Russia to then I remember Japan was a big threat and now China. But when you're living within this culture, there's no way to know is, is the fear that I'm being told that we should have about other countries? If it's real or if it's some form of like government propaganda or some, you know, some sort of way to try and get the population to do things. When you look out at the world, do you think a US citizen should have that, that view of that's a culture or a country we should be afraid of? Or is that a nonsensical way to look at the world?

Joscha Bach [00:15:16] I think as an individual looking at global history, it makes sense not to have that many emotions because there is this emotional investment is very similar to the emotional investment that people have into a wrestling match. It has no result on no effect on the outcome of that wrestling match, right? It creates an individual investment. And so in some sense it's a form of entertainment that is moving people's emotions and creates connection between them. But the decisions that are being made are largely not being made because people have thought about these issues deeply on the lower levels. And it's more interesting to see who is creating which emotion. Because public opinion is very pliable. It's people tend to be biased by what their friends think. And if you can influence what other people think about what other people think, you have much greater influence about what people think than by bringing out arguments about the ground rules. So basically the control of public opinion by telling people what everybody thinks, right? This is seems to be more important than telling people what the truth is. And so there's a disconnect between what people are afraid of and what's actually happening. And there's a disconnect between what you can personally do to influence your destiny in this world versus what you think the world is doing.

Joscha Bach [00:16:49] And so in some sense, the important question is what can you hear to hear right now in this moment? And you can play a very, very long game with this and this game can involve very many people, but there's always only this moment. There is not a tool by which you can put a lever into the real of history and gradually shift it at a global scale. You can only do this with individual actions that influence individual people, individual systems and individual acts that people are doing. That said, I think that the public opinion is reflecting the course that a society is taking. So if a society is at some level preparing for war, which means that the different players in the society are gradually agreeing or suddenly agreeing that there is a conflict on the horizon, then there will be efforts to shift public opinion in this way or that way. And we can measure that and see it. But in my perspective, the majority of people is not an agent in this. They're very little agency over their beliefs. And so it's more like a temperature that you can take over the public opinion.

Vance Crowe [00:17:53] That's a fascinating turn of of phrase. They have very little agency over their beliefs. Say more about that

Joscha Bach [00:18:01] Agency over your beliefs means that first of all, you need to understand epistemology, which is this word that philosophers use when they discuss what you can know and what criteria for truth are. And if we take for example, something like say the lab hypothesis is a good example for epistemology. So the epistemology means in my view that the confidence that you should have about something being true should equal the weight of the evidence. But everything that is not impossible is possible and you have to remain agnostic about all the things that are possible, but you have to also adjust the confidence in that space. So not everything that is possible deserves the same degree of confidence. And that also means if somebody makes a claim and has no no evidence to present for that claim, then you don't need necessarily to have confidence in that claim. And if that other one cannot have evidence for that claim, so for instance say was Jesus born by a virgin? How would you know? Have you talked to her a gynecologist? Are there any reliable sources and so on? Are there people who could have had reliable sources on this or was it always the case that there were people who were personally involved that might have had a vested interest for people to see it one way or the other for other reasons? Right? So there might be cultural reasons to adhere to a certain narrative because if you have a non random belief that not a normal reasonable person would have and you share this belief with your friends, maybe it marks you as one of your friends.

Joscha Bach [00:19:40] So it becomes like a branding iron on your intellect by which everybody can recognize that you are one of the good ones because you believe in something that is on, on the face of things extremely unlikely, right? This is something that is epistemologically unsound. So violations of epistemology are often a mark that distinguishes people within a movement or an ideology or a religion. And it's desirable sometimes if people build a religion to put these marks on on the minds of their members so you can recognize them that they believe non-random, non-rational things for the lab hypothesis to, to take this as an example, initially when you see that a virus breaks out, you know that a type of of this virus has been broken out from labs in the past, there is a possibility that this happens. So it's not very hard to rule it out. And when you see that the virus of the same type that is being researched on a lab emerges in a big city in very physically close proximity to that lab, that increases the possibility that this happens. And if you learn that the, the people in this lab worked on animals and did variations, studied variations of viruses and animals, especially bats, right? This suddenly increases the probability to such a degree that you might think that, okay, out of all places in the world, the lab that might be foremost in the world and studying this type of disease and was built after the first SARS breakout to study exactly this kind of disease is very close to where this happened.

Joscha Bach [00:21:21] Now this becomes not hypothesis, right? It should be the N hypothesis, unless you have an extremely good insight reason or good argument that you have reason to trust that speaks against that. And then you start seeing lots of interested people. So you see people which want this to be something that has been broken from a lab and was actually engineered possibly as a bio weapon to harm the world or to harm specifically the US or whatever. See quickly goes into modor reasoning where basically just because something fits into your preferred view of the world of its agency, of its moral outlook and so on, you think it should be this way or the other. Or you see the counterargument that people who have this particular bad view of the world are the ones who arguing for the possibility of a lab leak. Therefore the lab leak cannot have happened and it must have been a zoonotic, biological random origin that's as equally suspicious, right? As soon as you see players making arguments based out of the attempt to sway public opinion one way or the other because it fits into a certain narrative, you should be suspicious, right? So basically you should try to identify the likely biases that people have and try to correct for those biases. And this means more be more open to dismiss arguments that might be the result of such a bias and basically try to find the subset of the opinions that is compatible with all the data and focus your exploration on this set.

Vance Crowe [00:22:59] You know, this is something that you talked about in your, my favorite talk that I've seen that you give is the computational metas psychology. And you were talking about how it was evolutionarily advantageous, not necessarily to think the the correct thing, the right thing, but actually to think the normative thing. What is it that everybody else believes? Because to not believe what everybody else believes could make you an outcast in, in a tribal society or in an area where if you get pushed out of the group, you'd have to live completely on your own. It, it strikes me when I was reading Rene Gerard about mimetic desire that his thoughts on the fact that like human beings don't know what to want. In fact, if you just put a human being out in the world like a small child, it's, it's really not possible for them to want things other than maybe their biological needs. Do you take that, that normative belief to be the similar to, to Rene Gerard's mimetic desire concept?

Joscha Bach [00:23:58] I suspect that for us, the thing that distinguishes us from other primates is our programmability. It's not that we are smarter than the als, but that our society scales up in ways that the NAL society didn't know that tribal societies didn't. And this enables us to interact coherently with people that you never met. It basically identify strangers as having certain roles is following a certain type of beliefs. And this allows us to interact consistently with, with them even though we don't know them. And it's a fascinating thing that you suddenly get a society that is almost infinity scalable, doesn't really matter once you have this type of organization, whether you have hundreds of thousands or billions of individuals because you can suddenly interact with all of them according to a certain set of beliefs. And a tribe doesn't scale up in the same way. And I suspect that this, these changes that had had to happen had to do with us be more interested in understanding what other people believe to be true than what's actually true. And for our own life it's more important generally to know what our boss thinks, what our peers thinks, what the relationships that we have, think about the world and us than about what's actually true. Because what's actually true is something that is explored in a lab behind closed doors at some kind of frontier that really affects what you're doing. And the common beliefs are a good enough approximation for what's actually true.

Joscha Bach [00:25:31] And it's, it gets interesting when there is a deviation between the common beliefs and what's actually true.

Vance Crowe [00:25:37] Yeah. Particularly on things like, you know, a lab leak hypothesis or are vaccines safe or not. Like as those start, as you start deviating from there and then deviation causes real rifts in society to, to the degree that people believe they can't even live alongside one another anymore.

Joscha Bach [00:25:54] Yes. And issue is also one where that people are not just good as cooperation. We are very good at deep cooperation, but people have also evolved for conflict between groups. And we are not just a cooperative species, we are a species that is in competition with itself. And this competition largely doesn't happen so much between individuals because this doesn't get you very far. We are estate building species. It happens between groups that want to be a state and wants to have a shared harmonic belief at a very large scale. And if you can create a rift between people in this way, then you can split off your own spade say it in a way. And that's also what we have seen happening on social media. Social media has been open so far for, to a very large degree, which means that every set of ideas that wanted to evolve could, and started to capture people, capture the beliefs of people and spread through them. And it's very interesting to see that once you create such a opportunity for the emergence of say, cults and cultural emerge, and then they will of course become more agent and will start shutting down the possibility for newcomers to compete with them. And so we now see a movement to shut down the freedom of social media for opinions that compete with the opinions that have emerged on social media rather novel, right? We have a set of very, very shared beliefs, very strongly held beliefs that didn't exist 20 years ago and and never existed in human history ever, despite people basically being about as smart as they are today at least, right?

Joscha Bach [00:27:34] And these, these beliefs are not, cannot be questioned. They, and this is a very interesting thing when a belief cannot be questioned. For instance, if you see people with the art science, they believe in science, they don't express that they believe in the possibility that everything can be systematically criticized. It just means that New England Protestantism has entered a new face.

Vance Crowe [00:28:01] Oh that is fascinating. There's a guy named Zach Stein that refers to these as self terminating cliches, right? They're, they're a form of ideology because the statement in and of itself is designed to make it so we don't continue the conversation anymore. Well, in this house we believe in science or you know, I I there was a large sign over the, the our door coming into my house. This house believes in the Lord, right? Like those are self terminating cliches.

Joscha Bach [00:28:28] Yes, but let's not turn this into me intermediately into something normative. There is something good about this and the drawbacks of this, right? So it's, let's not start out as the attempt to say whether this is good or bad. It's very hard to build your own value from scratch and to be truthful in everything, right? In order to understand the world, you need to build on the knowledge of others. You need to build on intellectual and also ethical traditions because it's very hard to prove them from first principles as an individual, as I have learned in the course of my life. And in some sense that's what I had to try to do because grew up in communist eastern Germany, which didn't make a lot of sense to me. And what I had the news of Eastern Germany in the news of Western Germany every evening on tv, none of them appear to be true. And you have to pick from them. You have to pick from what your teachers are saying from the books that you find in your library are saying you have to identify what's true. And it's very hard to get very far if you do this all by yourself. So how do you find the truthful tradition? And the other one is when you want to act, you cannot act alone. You need to act together with others with whom you coordinate. So how do you find the right group, the right hive mind to link up to and to interact with? And while it is in some sense disgusting to me, if people are privileging the opinion of the group over their own insight about what's true, it is also something that is very powerful. Especially if you realize that you as an individual don't have a very good chance of discovering the ground tools and of discover of building a new group that is acting on this shared understanding of what the world world really is.

Joscha Bach [00:30:10] So this idea of that we believe in the Lord or that we believe in Jesus Christ means we believe in a certain mode of interaction. We believe in certain institutions that synchronize our beliefs. We believe in certain values that shape these groups. And we believe in together with this group building a civilization because this is the group that our loyalty lies with and we don't see a better alternative realistically. Right? The the same thing is true for the people who believe in science. We basically believe in ivy league science, they believe in priests that are Harvard ordained. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's not that easy to get that sacrament. And if you see, look at the available sacraments, it's not one of the worst ones.

Vance Crowe [00:30:50] You know, as I have heard you in the past describe, you know, the, the disgustingness of of having giving over groupthink, you know, instead of your own personal beliefs. But then you're also relatively kind to religions, right? You just kind of said, Hey, there's a reason why you would wanna do this if you decide that you're going to have children and you grew up in a Christian tradition, but then decide I'm not going to download that software onto my children. 'cause I think it has all these drawbacks, does that create a void in the child's mind or does that create, you know, an opening where some other thing is going to get poured in there? Because there must be software to run the program of the, of the child. So if you opt not to use the one of your past and you don't download a different one, what what happens there?

Joscha Bach [00:31:39] When I look around among the people that I met that basically had a problem in the intellect that was downloaded on them. So the previous generation, when this break happens, you start at the lower level I suspect, except when the hive mind of your parents was very dysfunctional to begin with and no longer tracking reality outside. So there is this difficulty that many of the traditional hive minds, for instance, the religious hive minds have not been able very well to track reality. And especially because most of the religions use a degree of superstition to indoctrinate people with their mythology and to install the right modes of interaction on them. And the superstition is incompatible with the scientific worldview over the rational tools that people need to succeed in capitalism and to achieve social mobility and so on. So there is is a way to make this compatible, but it's very hard and in an agricultural society it doesn't matter so much because the technological progress is not as vast and pronounced and doesn't play a big role. So you want to have rationality in your local interactions, but you don't need to have extremely rational opinions about how government works at scale or how te theology works or how mathematics works or how the scientific method works, right? And this has changed in a way. If you now want to for instance earn money on the stock market, you need to understand what money is at some level you need to understand how it's being created, destroyed, how the interactions work, this money in society, at least to some degree.

Joscha Bach [00:33:12] And so synchronize beliefs that exists as a tool to gloss over the inconsistencies in the construction of our social systems are now detrimental to your success in our society. But individually, I find that people get confused. Yes, there is for instance, intuitions that we need to have about the economy of social interactions. Why do people do what they do? And these interactions or these biases lead us to sometimes better models of reality because we can jumpstart the formation of all models. It's basically similar to architecture search in machine learning, machine learning, you have two issues. One is to converge, which means you have a neural network with on so many layers and so on, so many parameters. And then you do statistics over the data and map these statistics into the structure. And that is about some process of convergence. And the other hand, how do you find the architecture? How do you find the algorithms, how do you find the set of parameters that you need to use? What is the resolution of these parameters? How are these parameters interconnected into a larger structure? And this is the difficult thing to get right and the structure of your whole beliefs, the hierarchy of things, how the basic patterns of interaction. And when we look at the social interaction of people, we are born typically with priors of how social interaction works.

Joscha Bach [00:34:43] And these priors are different and different people and they determine the speed of the progress that we can make in the given society. And these priors seem to be have different success depending on the society that we find ourselves to be in, which means that we are born with certain priors that evolve in the given societal framework over centuries or millennia. So I suspect that people that are alive today have a very different set of beliefs when they're born with, that they're born with or biases to form certain beliefs that they're born with than people did have a hundred thousand years ago.

Vance Crowe [00:35:19] And so, and you mean that literally born with, you mean like not a blank slate? They are, they are. It's, it's in enc coded into their genetics in some way.

Joscha Bach [00:35:28] I noticed this in my cat, my cat has, is not very smart. The cat is pretty simple minded. For instance, the cat is not that good in spatial cognition. If the cat gets caught up in a wire, the cat has difficulty to figure out how to remove herself from this wire in, in a way that I think a 3-year-old child would easily understand. So spatial cognition of cats, despite their amazing abilities to move in space is not as sophisticated as as it people. And in part I think that cats are so good at moving their bodies because they are faster at doing spatial cognition, which means they would let their steps to some degree. And the same thing is true for social cognition. The cat at the age of one year as a better understanding of how things work in my family than my kids had at the age of three. And that's I think because the cat is born with sound priors that are expressed in a brought online relatively quickly and these priors are quite sophisticated. For instance, the cat figured out and experimented how far she can go with playing with every one of us. So she knows that my son doesn't want to be bitten because he is a little bit afraid of of that. But it's okay to bite my daughter and me during play, but also how much until it becomes unpleasant and be fight back or tell her that it's hurts and so on. And the cat is relatively fine tuned with that. The cat also is a result of a particular line of cats that had long tradition of being outdoors and feral before it was taken in again.

Joscha Bach [00:37:05] And so this cat doesn't want to drink standing water for some reason the cat has never drank anything from a a cup that we put down for her or from a bowl even when she was thirsty and she had indigestion because of this and constipation. And then we noticed that she was drinking from the faucet and we gave her a co fountain and she was always, is now always drinking from the cat. Found it. So a border needs to be running, right? This isn't evolutionary thing that probably made sense for some of her ancestors in the last few hundred years. And the cat also has hardcoded behavior when she's playing. So if a toy looks like a bird, she expects that a bird like toy when she approaches it to flutter away into the air, but versus the, when the toy looks like a rodent, then it's, she expects it to scuttle away and she has never hunted out in nature. So she hasn't learned this out in nature. But if you get it wrong, if the bird is scuttling away or if the mouse is flying away, she's upset and annoyed and walks away it doesn't want to play anymore because we are doing it wrong. It's, these are very sophisticated behaviors. You see all the same thing in dogs. A darkon is a a a dog that is specific bred to want to go into dark tunnels and to look after dangerous animals that could be dangerous to this dog even and drag them out of these tunnels. And other dogs don't do that, right? Other dogs might want to shepherd and then they, for the first time in their life are getting bored close.

Joscha Bach [00:38:36] Even if they grew up in a city to a herd of sheep, they might fall into shepherding behavior, which is quite specific. So how is that happening? Right? And it happens because they have been selected for this in the process of directed evolution where people have read these dogs for very particular purposes and civilization depends on very specific groups of people doing very specific things, right? This is what happens in an agricultural society. You need thousands or tens of thousands of people that specialize on doing warfare or they specialize on doing agriculture, specialize in doing administration. And these people get breathed for that purpose. You will have more success if you're, if you are good in, in this particular kind of job. And as a result, sometimes your children will be also be better off this job and you will hand the family business to them and so on. And as long as society is stable and as long as resources in society are scarce and children can still starve, if your society is not successful or your family within the society is not successful, we will breed people for particular kinds of purposes. And so in pre-modern times people were selected for being religious and people were, were selected for being compliant with agriculture and so on, I suspect. And these specifications, as we can see in the domestic animals that we have change relatively quickly. I also don't think that they are something that determines your individual destiny because they're just reflexes, they're just biases that make behavior of one way or the other slightly more likely.

Joscha Bach [00:40:12] And this means that you are more likely to learn a certain thing more quickly, but you can also unlearn them. And as soon as you learn the true nature of things, so not your biases, but you learn how things actually work and for what reason you have an actual causal model of reality, these reflexes are turned off. So it doesn't really matter what, whether you are I think born as a tribal person or as a a person that is the result of say a Christian society that has existed in this religious mode for a few thousand years and has eradicated all the villages. But you can still learn these things if you have opportunity to learn them. And if you can build the right layers into your mind and change your architecture, and this is one of the great powers of humans that they can reprogram themselves. So we are not only programmable, we can also get agency of our own programming to a large degree. We can wake up and get to the next level of understanding. This is what the psychologist Robert Keegan has described in his stages of personality development. And what he roughly describes is that at stage three we form our beliefs based on the environment. I also think based on innate priors of what we expect our environment to do, for instance, whether you think it's more important to follow the beliefs of others than your own beliefs is something like an innate prayer. It's a decision that your own mind needs to make right? To be influenceable by your environment, you need to be ready to be influenced.

Joscha Bach [00:41:45] And this leads us back to this earlier question. What happens if you don't interact inate your child? Isn't somebody else going to indoctrinate them? And that depends on the child, right? It depends on the inner decision of the mind of the child. It's not that at this point the child has agency over this because the child has no way to decide whether it's better to take in the beliefs of others or whether to reject them per default and build its own beliefs. So you will find some child children that are by nature quite obstinate and stubborn and will dismiss the opinions of their teachers and parents more readily than others. And you have others that will be uncomfortable developing their own ideas. And first of all, want to understand what the teachers think to be true and will want to take this in as their own noll hypothesis and then want to have very strong evidence before they deviate from the socially acquired non hypothesis. At stage four is where you discover epistemology, where you realize something is too independently of what others think. And independently also in the opposite, right? If somebody else who doesn't like something believes something to be true, right? Then it doesn't necessarily mean that the opposite is true. What's true is basically independent of other people's beliefs. It also only dependent on the evidence and that other people think something to be true is evidence that it worked for them for some reason, which might be because it's true, but you should take into account that it might also be false. And if you can construct your own beliefs in this way and can evaluate your beliefs freely and you're no longer beholden to these biases that something is true because you have an emotional attachment to the outcome, then you get agency over your beliefs.

Vance Crowe [00:43:23] I think a lot about the, you know, when somebody's downloading beliefs, because when my daughter Violet, when we were going to have like a regular babysitter, a nanny come into our house, we interviewed a whole bunch of them and it would almost always come up at first by them. But then I started asking that they believe in astrology and it became like at first kind of just a joke between me and my wife that a couple of people mentioned it and then several and then basically every person we've met with and now I go out and give talks and I'll ask rooms of people, how many of you, you know, really are, are curious about astrology or interact with it? And you'll see all these women from whatever, 18 up to 35 raise their hand and then a really sharp cutoff right above that mark. And I think like this must be some cultural movement that it's okay for people to, to, for these women to believe it. It must be some social thing that allows them to communicate with one another. But it, it just strikes me as something that is a, a, a very interesting phenomenon, particularly 'cause all these people live in the city and they can't even see the stars let, let alone interpret their meaning.

Joscha Bach [00:44:33] The issue is that to disprove astrology, you need to use entirely analytical, rational thinking. Your perceptual system, your emotions, your feeling can not by themselves disproof astrology because it needs first principle thinking. So if somebody gives you social proof for astrology, if they tell you it has worked very well for me and my friends, and then you get a few stories about this and you also make a few experiments and some of them might work out for you, maybe sometimes your horoscope comes true, but how you can, you disprove it, you need some kind of first principles thinking to do that. And this analytic first principles thinking mode is very brutal. It by and large doesn't work very well. And you use this mode to try to figure out purely analytical thinking that you make lists and arguments that are true or false about whether you should marry this person or not. It's probably not going to work out, right. If you list the advantages and disadvantages of entering a relationship with this person, it might help you to clear up your feelings, but ultimately you need to trust your gut. And your gut means it's the non-analytical mode of your thinking. It's is distributed neural network that you cannot fully introspect that is trained on reality. But that is, and it's not just doing first principle thinking, but that is able to evaluate very subtle things that you cannot analyze with applying grammatical rules onto a symbolic structure as we do a logical thinking, right? So if you need to make important decisions about the world, you you need to get out of the analytical mode sometimes except in those areas where your emotions are not reliable, your feelings are not reliable.

Joscha Bach [00:46:11] So rational thinking is a tool to deal with your darkest emotions with those that are hidden, that are unclear, that are murky. This is where you need to step in and take things apart and pry them apart until you have a clear feeling about it, until the system that directs your actions gives you a, a clear answer and you see why it gives you that answer. But for the most part, you will not have a model that is operating at that level of detail. With respect to astrology itself, the superstition that is inherent in it there is to get data that supports it. Astrology is working is not that hard. It's much harder to get data that conclusively shows that it doesn't because this means that you need to have enormous amount of statistics. And when I was young, I looked at astrology and I thought this is very unlikely to be true. Why? That I couldn't put my finger on it. Why It wasn't because there was such an elaborate sense. You had formulas that would allow you to calculate and there were books about this from your exact ude and longitude and date of birth or very particular things in your life would play out. So the more effort you would be making, the more knowledge you would be incorporating, the more books you would be reading about this, more, more authorities you were studying, the more you would be able to do. Is this right? And how is that not the scientific method? And it took a while before it struck me that none of these astrologers who had written these books could have collected data. They could not know the ground tools. They could not possibly have established the relationship between the formulas and these life events.

Joscha Bach [00:47:46] What kind of method that I could, they could I, if I was an astrologer use to establish that my formula is true, right? I would need to look at the destinies of millions of people. And back then when many of these books were written, the calendars were different and they call it relations were different and people were live very live different, very different lives. And there were also a very different kind of society and much, much fewer people, right? There were only millions of people in our society and not billions on the world. And so how is this still the same? How, how could they have done these experiments and so on? So they never had a case. And to understand that was very hard for me to get to, to all these steps. And the opposite is super easy. France ly has while ago shared a, a joke on Twitter and it was not a joke that he wrote, it was just something that we retweeted. It was a video of a young, very confident psychologist interrogating her audience. I think it was a TikTok, asking her to imagine certain numbers doing a set of equations in their mind and then imagine a vegetable. And then she held up a carrot and most people felt they were completely mind blown because they thought that as she implied that the sequence of thoughts that were completely unrelated to vegetables and carrots had pranked them to think about carrots. But if you take a, a random group of Americans and you ask them to think of a random vegetable, like maybe 40% will think carrot and this 40% will be completely blown away by this TikTok and share it.

Joscha Bach [00:49:29] And you don't need a hundred or 80% of the people to be convinced that your theory is good. If you can convince 1% of a very large audience that the completely unlikely theory works super well for them, right then they are going to be paying your bills. And a lot of s snake oil works in this way. So you'd and a lot of psychics work this way. You make an extremely detailed prediction. And if 80% of your audience say may and walk away, that's fine as long as 20% are completely blown away. And this is how astrology works. But counterargument for astrology, I think the best one that I've seen so far was, well, we would think that astrology should at least predict relationship success to some degree, right? This who is matching with whom this means that there should be a deviation in the statistics of how people find together based on their pathological science. And I mean it's, it's not unreasonable to think that there is, because maybe people born in March are different from people born in September because they go through seasons at different ages and most importantly when they are in school, they interact with children at a different cutoff date, right? So if you are the youngest in your class, which is related to the months in which you're born, you are much more likely to be diagnosed with A DHD. If you're the oldest in your class, you are more likely to be dominant in your class and as a result you will earn more money because you will more likely be promoted in leadership position later on in your life.

Joscha Bach [00:51:01] And you can show these statistical effects. So there is such a correlation between your date and birth that is caused by the school system and the cutoff dates and the school system. And you can, you can show that, but for relationship success it doesn't exist. So, and o OkCupid the statistics over the birth dates of people and millions of people in their database and their matching success, you see that it's completely flat. There's, it's absolutely equally distributed. So there is zero correlation with very high confidence between relationship success and your zodiac sign.

Vance Crowe [00:51:42] You talked about kids getting diagnosed with things like A DHD and this brought to mind for me the number of kids that get diagnosed with autism. I'm in my forties, I now have a bunch of friends that have young kids and several of them have have said, oh my, my children have autism. I don't like, this seems like a simplistic question, but I don't remember this many children having autism when I was growing up. Is this a matter of autism is actually increasing or what we're diagnosing is is more autism. And the reason I ask you is because I think you have an interesting insight into the, the minds of people. And I think most people don't even really have a concept for what autism is. If somebody were to say your child has autism, they really don't know what that means other than they, you know, they, they really need things to be patterned or something.

Joscha Bach [00:52:33] Yeah. Also found that when I looked at children, my own children and children of friends and that the diagnostics criteria that they're being subjected to, they're not always that helpful. It's more interesting to think what's particular going on with this particular child than to see whether DSM category fits. And this determines the treatment. The, with respect to your question, I think both happens. So we have more diagnostic criteria when I was young than autism or Asperger's was just discovered as a possible diagnosis. And A DHD also was not something that was frequently diagnosed, it was just something that was not so much on the radar. Autism did exist, but it was mostly applied to more severe cases. But the more severe cases have also increased. So it's not just that autism gets more diagnosed more readily, but children with learning disabilities with difficulty to focus with more increased sp spells of dissociation with difficulty to develop intuitive empathy and so on. This seems to be on the rise and the severe cases of autism, so not Asperger's, but people who are unable to learn to speak, that cannot walk properly, that cannot control their emotions at all and might be clawing at other people or biting them or themselves and hurt themselves in the process.

Joscha Bach [00:54:05] And so that is severely dysfunctional. This is also increased. And I think that autism, first of all is a developmental defect. It means that your nervous system is not forming in the right way and developmental defects are caused either by genetics, which means that there is some problem in your genetic code that is not being weed out, just genetic drift mutations that accumulate randomly over generations in which you child mortality is decreasing, which means you know, the longer selecting for defects. And the other thing is that environmental influences can interact with your development. And we don't in the US have a strong precautionary principle for chemicals. Basically, if something doesn't kill the rats in three months, it's fine. And unless you find a good reason to believe that it's not. And if there is something that is by itself not toxic, but it's just disrupting signaling processes during development, very lot subtle chemical signals that tells cells in your brain what type of cell there should be and what motor should be in depending on the proximity to certain other points in the brain that secret certain chemicals and interact with them. And these individual cells are locally measuring this chemical gradient. This is how the different cells know where they are in the brain and what kind of cell should differentiate on, right. And these effects are if they interact with chemicals, for instance, in your foot or in your water or in your clothing or in your furniture, then it's very difficult to detect these effects in a rat experiment because they are going to be different for every species.

Joscha Bach [00:55:53] And in humans they play out a very long time. You basically need to look over an entire generation on how the effect will be before you know the certainty. And this is something that is very deeply concerning to me. So if we have in, after we change the chemi composition of our foot and allow a number of new chemicals in our foot within a single generation and within that generation we see a lot of increase of developmental defects. I'm very concerned, especially since we don't have any coordination to get rid of that,

Vance Crowe [00:56:26] That I am, I'm really glad I asked you this because I'm very surprised by that. You're one of the only people in the scientific community I've ever met that said, Hey, I think it could be something in our food or the, the clothing that we're wearing could be doused with some kind of chemical. It's, this has to be something that, I mean in, in the world that I live in, not many scientific people think this way. It would put you pretty far outside of that little, you know, enclave.

Joscha Bach [00:56:53] Oh, I don't think so. I suspect that most people that I'm talking to the be aware of the fact that, for instance, estrogen in the drinking water since we introduced the pill is an issue, right? The estrogen that are are being as being used as a contraceptive and that is not completely filtered out in water treatment is visibly affecting fish and female OLS in, in environment. So we see this effect, and it's probably also affecting people, right? If you give everybody estrogen, even if it's a low dose estrogen during that development in utero and as babies and as children, it's going to have a slight effect on their bodies. And the same is true for substances in our food and food chain that are mimicking hormones. That is messaging, messaging, genomic chemicals, for instance, s have the property that they can interact with some of the receptors that are being used by hormones in our own body, and as a result, give a signaling to how our bodies should develop. And the same is also true for not just, but probably also for soy. So a lot of soy products that got into our food chain might interact at some subtle level with our signaling.

Vance Crowe [00:58:20] And so if this were, if this, what, what does a human do, right? That if it's in your food or in your water, I can remember living in, in Africa, and there was a time when we thought aflo toxin was in the corn and like corn was e everything you ate, right? It was like the primary. You get ate at the paste called Ali. And when you start to have a fear that something is poisonous in the food, even in low doses, it clouds your every thought. Like basically everything you're thinking and doing all day, every day swirls around the idea that you may be being poisoned. So if, if this is what you're thinking about is does this cloud all of your thoughts or was I being hyperbolic when I was living in,

Joscha Bach [00:59:02] No, not at all. I'm not trying to think about it that much. I'm trying to mostly eat the things that I think my ancestors. Eight, I suspect that people can, within a few generations get, be fine with most food sources, also with a lot of toxins in food because we can just evolve to deal with these toxins. But it'll be at the expense of child mortality, right? Because the only way that something gets into the next generation is that it mutates into the next generation. Most mutations are not in the right direction. So throughout human history, there has been a selection for new traits. The reason why we have new generations is adaptation because the individual organism cannot adapt very much. The individual organism can converge to something that has already been built into it by evolution. So there's a certain range of things that you can adapt to, but it can usually not adapt to completely new foot sources very well. And if you want to have something that is non deleterious, you need to stay with this for a few generations and allow mutation and selection. And of course, we all agree we don't want to have selection. We don't want to die in childhood or we don't want our children to die. So how can can we achieve that? I don't really know a solution to this. We can do a few things with pre-implantation diagnostics, so we can filter out deleterious mutations where we already know that they're not good ones. But it's difficult to use something like pre-implantation diagnostics to select for benevolent mutations because we don't know how they will play out.

Joscha Bach [01:00:33] So it's very difficult for us to breed a new generation that is able to deal with new food sources. And so my tendency would be to be for myself, relatively conservative with food. I would want to eat similar food as works for my ancestors. And if I try new food, I would want to monitor how I feel and interact with my own body on at scale. There is very little we can do because we have certain food that is very cheap to produce at any given time with enormous amount of people. We probably cannot change agricultural food production back to the state that it was in a hundred years ago and still feed, feed people comfortably. So we have to deal with the fact somehow that our food is now different.

Vance Crowe [01:01:18] You know, when we were talking before about autism and Asperger's and you talk about mutations or like this is a, like a mental defect. The several friends that I have that have Asperger's, it is, it's made them extraordinary in some ways. Like certainly they're a little bit difficult to get along with sometimes or they have some quirks, but, but that trait combined with high IQ has made them capable of doing things or paying attention to things that most normies couldn't even come close to.

Joscha Bach [01:01:47] Yes. But I suspect that the majority of people on the spectrum do not develop superpowers. So on average, I suspect the they're less employable. And the people that you become aware of, people like Mark Zuckerberg, they are the outliers, right? So there's a selection bias you will have among your friends, mostly those that are super functional, that have local superpowers typically at the expense of something else. And I think when you have high functioning autism Asperger's and you have difficulty to make models that are very deep, which is often the case. So one of the problems that I seem to be seeing often in people that are on the autism spectrum is that they, there seems to be an issue with signal propagation, which means that the signals in their brain do not go very deeply over too many layers as as if they're operating on a higher frequency. So their lobes are shorter, and as a result, they need to integrate over fewer layers. And as a compensation, their brain will increase the degree to which they can discover patterns on the previous layer. So these people are often down in the weeds. They might not see the big picture very easily, but they're very, very good at dealing with the small picture. And computers are all about the small picture. Computers are cannib for many people with Asperger's because the world of the computer is essentially flat.

Joscha Bach [01:03:19] It's not deep. Everything is scripted, everything is conceptual, it's all on the same level. It's the opposite of art. For art, you need to look very deep, right? You make this connection between what's meaningful to you and what you perceive on the lowest level. And you go very, very deeply. You see the significance of things. And they're also people which are very deep into art often and so on, are probably also on the spectrum, just in the other direction, right? So when we think of autism, we mostly think of people that are very literal, that have sensory overflow issues because they have difficulty to single out stable features from the layers that they're observing. And stability requires that you integrate over many layers. And you have on the other hand, people that are, are in permanently wholly mode that see everything as extremely significant, even the smallest dust mode in the sky, and that are also not getting anything done for different reasons, right? And this is might be part of the same spectrum in a way that where the speed or the, the depths of signal transmission in the perceptual system is affected. And I suspect that for A DHD, a similar thing happens not for perceptual signals, but it happens for control signals. So people with A DHD tend to be very impulsive, which means they have difficulty to interact on the long games, on long game reward.

Joscha Bach [01:04:50] They often can think long term, but they're often not able to act on the long-term impulses because the short term impulses take over. It's basically as if there's a hierarchy of functions, of purposes that determines your behavior and only the purposes that give immediate reward can affect the behavior, whereas the purposes that affect the long game cannot become effective, which leads to enormous frustration for these individuals because they know better at some level, they just don't find that they act on the understanding of the world.

Vance Crowe [01:05:23] Why is there a difference between those two? Why is it that the human mind isn't just in control of itself? Like why can't I just say I'm going to eat healthy and then therefore every one of my decisions already be made?

Joscha Bach [01:05:35] Well, I think if you don't have any trace of a DHD, you will be in charge of that because it means that your behavior is going to be directed by your longest game. And if you build such a model, it also means that you have to have an effective model of the future very deeply. And these effective models of the futures tend to be very sparse and brittle because the world is branching a lot. And if the world is changing a lot, you cannot reliably think very, very far ahead, right? So you should have a balance between the narrative models that go very far into the future that are typically analytical models and the immediate models of what you want to do in the next hour or want what, what you want to do in the next week and what you want to do in the next months and and so on. And you should prioritize to some degree the stuff that happens right now and to reap rewards right now rather than just acting on extremely long games. So you should be able to discount things that are very far in the future, even if you don't know the possibilities, just because so much is happening. If you think about science fiction, which by the way is is very young, right? Science fiction literature only exists since we have technology. There was no real science fiction in the medieval ages. It was not much before driven and so on. And there was no science fiction for the Greeks. And that's because their society was largely stable. They did not expect completely new types of technology to emerge and completely trans figure the way in which their society has worked.

Joscha Bach [01:07:10] The science fiction that we find in our literature is typically extrapolating based on known technologies that are scaled into the future very hard and to see to which face change this would lead. So you always thing is you develop spaceships or you develop satellites and you scale this up into settling other planets, and then you combine this with what you already know and about how settlement and pioneering, and then you have space force and space empires and all these things that get yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:07:41] Separated

Joscha Bach [01:07:42] From this, right? That's

Vance Crowe [01:07:42] Basically, that's foundation. That's that's all of them. Yeah.

Joscha Bach [01:07:46] Euro foundation are super interesting because they are take a different perspective in foundation. I think if you take the books, they, you have a world in which there is continuous technological progress, there is going to be always the next thing that is going to change everything at the same time. You have a very weird kind of mathematics that is not intelligible. There is basically a hidden pattern that Harry seldom is discovering of reality. And the hidden pattern is something that you cannot see in me, I cannot see, but Harry Seldon can do it with this arcane mathematics that allows him to see how things are going to be at scale despite the new technology being developed, right? So this, this deeper thinking is somehow able to account for these tech technological developments in the way in which normal thinking is not, despite these events not having been made. And I think this is superstitious, right? For of thinking in foundation is fundamentally superstitious. Also, foundation is a very simple premise. The the simple principle which is scaled up here is that humanity will settle the galaxy while we still remaining human, right? So there will still be naked monkeys that care about how much sugar they eat and they smoke pipes. They are sexist in the stereotypical way of the fifties, and especially Asimov himself right there. Gender relations are really archaic in, in this particular way of this very, very particular era.

Joscha Bach [01:09:20] He has only scaled up this dimension. We are going to settle the galaxy and we are going to go into a stable empire. And what would be if he could predict the future of empires mathematically? And then he scales this idea, right? So if we could do this, we could see when this empire cycle is going to end and why, and we could predict how it's going to play out, and we could predict bifurcations if we could take to make sure that the course of history is going to be changed. And then we tell a bunch of relatively naive and boring stories, visit that universe and explore single ideas in that universe. And then he explores some extremes. So he explores some extreme and human aesthetics where a hive mind evolves. And so we have a planet where people telepathically share all the ideas and intentions aren't, aren't this result, as a result are in some semi enlightened state. And on the other hand, you have individuals that do the opposite that became, become complete singletons and no longer interact and, and single individual is going to rule an entire continent and is interacting with the other individuals on other continents. And both of these extremes exist, but they don't influence humanity at all. They're just outliers that are being studied in one of the stories, but they manage not to change the course of the story. And then none of these modes is going to take over the, so that's, that's different from June and, and June. You have, and sorry, you can cut me off if you want.

Vance Crowe [01:10:49] No, this is awesome. I actually would love to hear your thoughts on June. Go ahead.

Joscha Bach [01:10:53] So in June, in some sense, the opposite has happened. The low hanging fruit of technological development have all been discovered a long time ago. And there are still new technological developments, but they've acquired extensive research now. They take, it takes tens of thousand years of making substantial progress. And a few things have been understood as that ends. So for instance, AI is an existential risk. If you allow AI to emerge, then AI will take over because it can leverage more intelligence than human beings and more technology than human beings. And if you allow AI to develop free d it's only a matter of time until it takes over. So it's a cancer that needs to be stomped out in the June universe, which also makes the June universe more interesting because it's a reason why we retain human aesthetics. And the battles are not all fought by ai, but computers don't exist in this universe. Everything is manually controlled, which very good storytelling device, but it also makes sense. Just the question is can you actually stomp it out? And he tries to sketch this out. The other thing is the success of the players in the June universe depend on the ability to follow long-term plans. So everything is about long-termism, about building conspiracies that go over an extremely long time span. And those players which are unable to follow these long-term plans, there are the pawns in the game and they're being sacrificed all the time. And they do exist, right? Like the, a trade is, are such a pawn in the longer game between the Benegas and the Empire and a few other forces.

Joscha Bach [01:12:31] And so the, the universe of June is also in some sense a quite deterministic universe. But here the determinism is not because of astrological mathematics that seldom can figure out and the absence of understanding technological developments, but it's because people actually make plans. Because they actually force the universe in their own determinism because they want the universe to be deterministic so they can control it, right? So the determinism in the June universe is the result of the deliberate control by players that act against each other and try to fight against each other to fight against, to make different universes happen.

Vance Crowe [01:13:10] The, I mean, the sci-fi book reviews by Yosha is, is an would be an awesome spinoff series. Can you do three body problem? Next

Joscha Bach [01:13:21] Three body problem is interesting in, in a sense that it combines two different types of literature in my view. One is this mathematical epistemological philosophical stuff that is interacting with cosmology. And this was the what the initial sweet body problem is about, right? So we look at what does the universe look like from the perspective of an embedded observer? Can we make sense of it? And he describes this for an alien civilization that happens to live in a world that is completely alien to us. And it's so alien that our own intuitions about how the world works and what makes sense do not apply. So we get basically teleported back to our own history at the time where we had no tools, no tradition in making sense, no narrative, no mythology that would explain how our own world works, right? Before we had the idea that there are lamps of mass that are lumping together through gravity in space and then forming sense and planets. And these planets rotate on, on orbits in 3D due to spatial curvature around these centers of mass and so on. It this, all these narratives didn't exist back when we started out. And so we now start out with a, a planetary system that has multiple sense. And as a result, the planet is an extremely complicated and somewhat chaotic trajectory, which makes it almost impossible to determine the future and to tell narratives of the future and the species that lives on it, the intelligent species has adopted to it by going into an hibernating stage.

Joscha Bach [01:14:59] And that makes the species and their interactions extremely unintelligible to us and mystical to us, right? It's very arcane, brutish, wild ways of interacting that to them look sophisticated, but to us look alien. And this allows us also to look at the mode of civilization with fresh eyes, right? When we now look at different civilizations, very often people ask, is this progress? Is this better or is this worse? They don't ask about why did this work best at that time and therefore had to happen. When we think about jk, we think, oh my god, this is very British, very primitive. It killed a lot of people. The way they lived this dramatic style and so on was in many ways inferior to the way in which we perceive our society to be. Yet it was almost able to wipe western society out. How was that? Right? There was a mode of organization that was much, much more effective. And evolution is not about what's better, it's about what's more effective, right? Good and bad only exists with respect to a shared purpose. So it exists with respect to hive mind that you are already part of. And so the three body problem leads us first of our, our out of our present hive mind, out of our present mythology into a new one. And then leads, invites us to look at our own world with fresh eyes from the perspective of an alien civilization.

Vance Crowe [01:16:26] Oh man, go ahead. Thi this is an excellent review. I mean, I, I read the book and took away totally different context, but as I hear you describing it, I'm like, that's exactly right.

Joscha Bach [01:16:37] And the, if, if you look at the dark forest, I, I think that's a very important contribution. The dark forest paradigm,

Vance Crowe [01:16:47] Which is the second book of the series. So there's three body problem, the dark forest, and then the third one is the watch. That's right. The watch

Joscha Bach [01:16:54] The dark forest is constitutes a break from the three body problem, right? Even though there is no nearly a connection because it turns out that this three body civilization does indeed exist and it's going to interact with us in detrimental ways. The this narrative is completely different. He suddenly gets thrown back into our present society and he tells a very interesting particular narrative. You have a woman who is the daughter of an a scientist who was a victim of the Chinese cultural revolution, and she hides in the Chinese modern day equivalent of city, of the search for electro extraterrestrial intelligence and is looking for signals from species from other planets. And that dark forest paradigm is doing a way with the hippie notion of space exploration. The hippie notion of space exploration is that being a hippie is the natural mode of society, right? This is for instance, the perspective that is in the new gro book about civilization. That basically people are by nature hippies, they're kind to strangers, they're kind to each other and they only get mean to each other when evil people get on top and manipulate society into inventing the patriarchy and all the other bad things that are making people evil and aggressive and are, are leading to imbalances in power and oppression and injustice in the world.

Joscha Bach [01:18:30] And this is a position that is very near and dear to my heart in a way because I am the, I think the result of an evolution that turns people into domesticated beings. And I am domesticated myself in this way. I am a sheep. I have a strong inhibition against initiating violence. I'm not a wolf. I don't get off by biting somebody's throat and drinking their blood so I can live right this, but a wolf does. And there are people which are basically are fine with that. They're going on what's best in life, right? It's, what is it? It's laughter your enemies and hearing their crying cry

Vance Crowe [01:19:16] Cries and the laymans of their women, right? The lay

Joscha Bach [01:19:18] Yes. As they're driven before you, yes. So this is a, a state that you can be in if you are a warrior. And there are warriors which are successful as warriors, and there are peasants and workmen and craftsmen and mathematicians that are successful in their professions. And they will have driven inclinations, different aesthetics. And the hippie aesthetic is a particular one. And the science fiction of the, our presence civilization, the Star Trek universe and so on, has essentially been developed by hippies who thought that they techno hippies, they're hippies who think that you need technology, you need a degree of weaponry to have peace, you need immune response in your society. But by and large people are good, intelligent beings are good. They want to link up, they want to to be harmonic, they want to be friends with each other. And once we meet them, there will be ways to explore how this works. And they're often at an earlier stage of development where they have not discovered yet that they're all hippies, right? And so it's a very beautiful perspective and I really like it. I'm sympathetic to it. And it took me a long time to work through this and realize that it's probably not true because the thing that is built around this or is built on on this, our identity, and it's the last stage or that Kegan describes the fifth stage is when you get agency over your own identity, your own identity, whether you are a hippie or a warrior or a a me peasant or a mathematician and so on, and you think this is the right way to live.

Joscha Bach [01:20:55] This depends on a certain way, on your purposes, outside of yourself, above yourself, yourself tends to be downstream from this. It depends on what's sacred to you. It depends on how you relate to a transcendental agency to the next level agent that you're part of. And if you don't relate to any next level agent that you're part of, you have to be either at the top, which means you are some kind of singleton that is governing everybody else and very few people are capable of that, or you are will be ineffective because we are a state building organism. We have to, to, to achieve anything on the planet, do this together with others, preferably with very large groups that we have to deeply interface and cooperate with, right? So this relationship to shared purposes to a sacredness is crucial for us and it shapes who we are in our own understanding more than we typically are aware of. And being able to understand our own identity, our own sacredness, the construction of our own sacredness and being able to change that is very powerful. And once we understand that identity is flexible, we begin to understand the identities of other people. We understand where they're coming from, that their identity is the result of where they were born, in which side on the Middle East conflict they're in is the result not of whether they're good or evil or stupid or smart or insightful or dump, but it's the result of them being born in a certain place and the things that happened to them and then the thoughts and insights that they had as a result of that. And so this is the crucial thing that we have to understand that is an ecological of opinions, but people have all opinions that are possible to have physically in a way.

Joscha Bach [01:22:32] And you can find all possible opinions on the internet. It's not because people are especially stupid or especially mean or especially smart, it's just because it's possible They will emerge and incentivized opinions will be abundant. So back to the dark forest, the dark forest idea is that the natural mode is that there is scarcity in the universe. And the main scarcity is real estate. There's only a limited place number of places that are good and there is an unlimited amount of potential life that wants to settle them. And life by itself is a principle. It's, it's this principle of growing complexity in the environment, in a scalable self replicating way. The only way that life is possible that we know is cells in, in this carbon cycle, but maybe there are other forms of life that are conceivable, but you need to have something that is able to settle to create complexity. And I think what's crucial for the type of life is that we are looking at is that it can solve almost arbitrary control problems, which means it has to have during machine build into it, some kind of small computer that can model reality in arbitrary ways. And on this computer, it somehow needs to implement a functional approximator, a way to learn how to do that. And the simple system that is able to do this is the cell. The cell contains a small touring machine, D-N-A-R-N-A tape with a red right head that is able to execute programs and evolution can modify these programs.

Joscha Bach [01:24:08] And on top of that, the cell has evolved more mechanisms for learning. So the cell is a little single cell animal, right? It's a cell is an little being that is exploring the universe and try to tries to survive in this universe, maintain its own equilibrium. And to do this, it needs to harvest more energy from the environment or at least as much energy from the environment as it requires to maintain its own structure. So the these cell is also a little empire of molecules that are arranged in such a way that they, they can conquer a part of the universe and extract resources from it, and then cells can lump together to build this empire together. And then you have an organism. And an organism is tight organization of cells that act in a coherent way with each other. So there is something like a meta cell. They solve control problems together and life can survive because it is able to put a little bit of energy into the environment to get more energy out of it, to solve a control problem in this way, which a dump chemical process cannot do because a dump chemical process like combustion cannot actually compute anything. It cannot make a model of the future. So it's only following a direct gradient and this ability to do something that is not just following a direct gradient, this is what makes our minds special and what makes life special. So once you have that, once you realize this, that is the basic driving force of evolution, the ability to settle and to build empires. And the harmony that we have within the empire is just something that happens within your kingdom that happens is the mode of harmonization within the group and as a result of inner group specialization, but doesn't happen at the frontier of the group where you need to pioneer.

Joscha Bach [01:25:48] Once you make that switch, you realize that when you, when you meet aliens, these aliens will probably not be hippies. Because if there is a way for people to meet each other because faster than I travel as possible, it means that the universe will probably be settled. All the surfaces that can be settled will be settled after a certain amount of time. And they will be settled by the most successful colonizers, by the most successful empire building species. So this is the idea that he explores. Life is in a normal mode, in nature, in a jungle is afraid it hides unless it's on the pro and on the hunt. And so this go ahead is why the forest is dark at night. That's why your sparse was making your signal was making yourself known.

Vance Crowe [01:26:39] This is so fascinating to me. So for people that haven't read the book, the, the reason I consider it the dark forest is I think of the almost obscene level of loneliness that the wall facers would have to be. So there's these characters that they are there. Human race has to, and this is the very beginning of the book, so I'm not giving anything away. The human beings in order to outcompete these colonizers that are coming for them sometime in the future, the, if they write anything down or say it to anyone else, the idea will instantly be known by the alien race. And so for me, I sat and thought about the social implications throughout the entire book that that was like the, yeah,

Joscha Bach [01:27:23] This is the third book, right? So we were still at the That's the start, the watch, yeah, yeah. So the, the watcher to the wall. So the first one is, the second one was that we are almost done with the second, let's mark this up. Our Chinese scientist with her broken family history and their big pain about humanity in the way it works because she has never gotten over the loss of her family. And the

Vance Crowe [01:27:48] Oh, that's right, right, you're right. So

Joscha Bach [01:27:50] She is sitting in this American city project and she is, she's not a hippie. And she does realize that there is danger in communicating with the aliens because the message that she gets from the aliens is from a nice guy, from hippie guy from this other civilization, from a friendly liberal who is sending a message and tells them, I just got your signal. Stop sending, I got this. I will hash it up because if my species learns about your existence, they will come for you and you'll be gone. And she decides to respond to this message to invite the aliens to earth. And that's because she from her own perspective is thinks that our own civilization is doomed in part because her own heart is broken, but also in part because she looks from this broken hearted perspective, this traumatized perspective on our civilization and sees that we're not able to solve our ecological political, social coordination problems. So if you leave humanity alone without human super supervision, we are gone. We are doomed. The only way that we can possibly survive is by getting adult supervision, by being enslaved by an alien species. And there is a possibility that this is not going to end well for us and that we're going to be completely eradicated, but there is also a chance that we might be saved. And if we don't take this chance, we, there is no chance that we will survive. She decides if left by themselves, humanity will eradicate itself.

Joscha Bach [01:29:24] That's her own perspective. So she invites the aliens to come to earth and the aliens notice and they sent a message. And this message is basically we are technologically so far superior that we don't care what you will do against us. And they send a faster than night probe that is extremely intelligent and uses physics that is far outside of the reach of what humans can do. And uses this to sabotage all further progress in foundational physics. So we will not be able to develop super dense materials that are basically have the density of a nutrient star in, in the heart of a spaceship. So we cannot in no way break it up and so on, or harvest energy sources that allow objects to move much, much faster and accelerate faster and corner much faster than our ships can do it and so on. So we have no chance to, to win this competition. And the aliens are sending a fleet in motion that is moving from, I think from alpha au at slower than light speed. So we do have a certain amount of time until they will be here, but there's nothing that we can do about it and to do something about it anyway, humanity devices, this plan of the wall facers, which are agents that are unpredictable and they hope that by being unpredictable, we might have a chance against the aliens. So they create a, a few agents that work in hidden behind the governments that the governments are not allowed to interfere with, that the hive mind is not allowed to interfere with.

Joscha Bach [01:30:59] And this is an interesting perspective because I think it's an attempt to reflect our own fate. Right now, obviously the author of these books thinks himself that his main character has very good arguments that we might be doomed as a civilization and globally we cannot escape this destiny. So we need small disruptive agents that find solutions that build networks among themselves and try to find a solution to solve the impossible, the seemingly impossible. And I think that he does a good job in building a, a good narrative in the last book from a plot perspective. It's quite interesting because you see people that do long-term plans that are very counterintuitive, that include assassinating some good people that otherwise would trigger technological developments that are not the right ones from the perspective of a particular wall phaser and so on. But eventually the aliens are defeated with the Ds X machine that it is not completely plausible. So I find that the resolution of the third book of series is unsatisfying because it is something that is, is not logical. It's not something that you would expect to happen. And this also conveys an important message. While the book ends on a hopeful note, the hopeful note is entrained in, I actually don't have a good reason why it should be ending. Hopefully.

Vance Crowe [01:32:29] Yeah. I actually came to the conclusion when I ended the book like, sorry for anybody, if this is ruining it for you, that it was, it was not unlike like Game of Thrones or Lost or something where you're just like, I, I've been in this whole ride, it's been beautiful and something ended and I just had to conclude that maybe this is the dream that you tell yourself so you can go to sleep at night because this, this, anyone rationally having read the the thoroughness with which he'd used logic on every other part of the argument just wasn't, it wasn't there in the last three pages of the book or five pages of the book.

Joscha Bach [01:33:02] So we feel bad that we spoiled the book. I don't think so because we only spoiled for people who had been living under a rock and didn't read it because it was one of the most important science fiction in the last few years, right? So it's, there is a very good chance that the people haven't read it. We're not going to read it anyway. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:33:19] My

Joscha Bach [01:33:19] There'll be So with the summary for the

Vance Crowe [01:33:21] Well, and my, my my belief, so Rob Long, one of my good friends always says, you can't actually spoil a really good book because the good, the the great book isn't in the conclusion, it's in the experience of the book. I

Joscha Bach [01:33:32] Agree with it, yes. And it's also one particular perspective. And I think that there are many valid perspectives on these books. And it's only what I took personally out of a single reading.

Vance Crowe [01:33:41] Yeah, I, I read the, the, the watcher, the final book just shortly after my daughter had been born. And the isolation that these people had to go through in order to be wall facers, I found to be a visceral experience. I, I don't think I will ever forget the experience of reading that book. So to wrap up, you know, you've made reference to, we've seen one of your children walk in the background, you know, you have kids, I have kids, we were talking about software and downloading it on them. As you think about being a parent, and you've been one for a few years now, what do you think is the most important lesson you've, you've had to learn about being a good parent?

Joscha Bach [01:34:24] I'm trying to be a good parent. I don't know if I always succeed. My own attempt to be a good parent is to support my children in finding their place in the universe. But doing this means to support their autonomy in doing this. So my ideal is to not tell them what to do, but to tell them, model this, look at this thing. Have you taken this into account? And I take them seriously as individuals I remember. And I try to remember what it was like to see the world through the eyes of a child. It's not that long ago after all. And I understand that for me, the crucial thing was that I was creating my own universe. I was making sense of the universe by myself. And I didn't experience at any point that my way of thinking about the world was in the inferior to the way in which the adults thought about the world. Just because there was a child, I felt that I could see many things that the adults could not see. And the same thing is true for my children. They do see a lot of things that I am incapable of seeing because I can no longer resolve them. And so I asked my children, often I ask for their advice about parenting sometimes about what to do, and I try to explain my decisions when they're frustrated about them

Vance Crowe [01:35:45] In what, can you gimme an example of a, of a thing? You've asked them for advice on that, that seems very counterintuitive.

Joscha Bach [01:35:53] If a child is very disruptive, right? There is a reason why the child is disruptive. And you can ask the child why this, why it happens like this and what to do about this.

Vance Crowe [01:36:05] Well, yosha, I I know you gotta run. I just wanted to say I, as a parent, I remember reading your tweet about childhood being the Garden of Eden and how, how the, it's, it's a metaphor, but it also is a representation of what all parents want to do for their children. And I have to say that that has been reflected in my own parenting decisions in the way that I've interacted with my child. So I, I can say for certain that your Twitter feed and the ideas that you put into the world have impacted me and my family in deep and profound and very positive ways. So I hope you continue on and, and know that I absolutely love talking with you.

Joscha Bach [01:36:46] That's a beautiful essay by Paul Graham from 2008 Lies with our Kids, it's has aged well, and it's interesting to read it. Many of the con misconceptions that we have about the world are the result, I think of lies that are being told by our parents. And some of these lies might be necessary because they will protect children from getting jaded too early or for just being incompetent adults instead of explorers that are fearless and fierce and can go out because they're being shielded from some of the dangers, right? So it's sometimes necessary to create a certain safe place for exploration that allows the child to take risks that you cannot take as an adult. And on the other hand, if you don't tell the children how the world actually works, if the goal of parenting is to shield children from the hard truth of the world for as long as possible, regardless of whether what the child can understand and deal with, and children have very dark fantasies, so they already understand where we dark things in their own mind to be possibly the case, right? If you, if you hear them from them too much, you lose this risk that every generation loses the plot even more. And I think it's important to be truthful, to be truthful of the things that are painful to us, that hurt us to be truthful about our joy and our sadness. And in this way also allow children to deeply connect with us because they experience the world in a deeper way, I think, than the media designed for kids are doing that.

Joscha Bach [01:38:27] So this Garden of Eden means that you have a place where the children live in a world where all the animals are vegetarian, where there is no evil. The evil is just a pathology. It's not the result of conflict, it's not the result of something else. Wanting your food and having from its own perspective, a right to that and understanding this conflict is very different from say, Disney. And compared to the Grims fairytales, we don't live in the grims fairytales world anymore, thankfully, right? So we don't necessarily need to tell our children

Vance Crowe [01:39:02] That there are

Joscha Bach [01:39:03] People out there that would eat them and that parents might send them into the forest because they don't have food to feed them anymore. And that is so if this happens, need to make sure that they don't get eaten by others that are nice to them. But there is a truth in that, right? So there's this conflict about violence and death does exist. It's just something that only now exists at the fringes of society. And when we, these stories were created, they were created in different universe. I think that the stories right now that we tell our children they need to exist for our children do not depict our universe very well. They're not truthful. And they basically make our children very vulnerable to indoctrination with ideas that are not true, that manipulate our children into things that are not in their best interest and that manipulate them away from getting agency over their beliefs and ultimately their identity.

Vance Crowe [01:39:58] You had recommended with Lex Friedman a an anime movie, and I just can't the name of it, Makoto

Joscha Bach [01:40:10] Princess Monka,

Vance Crowe [01:40:11] Princess Monko, the the, I watched that last night and I was struck by the idea that there was not, it was not a clear, obvious outcome like the, the the, it was just, it was fascinating and it was so complex. And I was like, I would so much rather my children watch a cartoon like this where the character has development and everyone has their own reasons for doing what they're doing. And there wasn't just a clear line between good and evil. I, I found that to be profound and I'm totally,

Joscha Bach [01:40:42] It's true for all his movies. So you should watch all of them. And when you do it with your kids, you probably want to start with a Toro, which man Monka is one where there people decapitated. Yeah, there is war. It's very violent, right? It's, it's probably something that is appropriate for 12 year olds, but not for six year olds,

Vance Crowe [01:41:01] Right?

Joscha Bach [01:41:02] And the 12-year-old better be somewhat precautious, even though my children both love the movie, but it's very hard to keep them away from this. But if you see these movies like Totoro, you have many, many layers and they, none of these movies is boring for adults or for children to watch because the story is unfolding like reality on many, many layers. You see things happening in the background that are just as complex as the thing in the foreground. The low level patterns are as interesting as the high level arcs in in his movies. And when there is a big question, the question often doesn't have an answer. And very often he just observes things. So all his movies in some sense describe an arc of our civilization from a certain perspective without giving a resolution because things ultimately are not good or bad. They just are, they're only good or bad with respect to our current understanding.

Vance Crowe [01:41:52] I totally agree that, that the, there were no large questions answered. And like for a, for an audience that's just been primed over and over again to the, everyone lives happily ever after. It's a, it's a jarring way to end a movie, but it is still satisfying because the experience of watching the movie unfold is so complicated that you're engaged in it. It's, it's not many. I I can't imagine very many cartoons otherwise that put you in a flow state, right? That put you in a state where you're completely absorbed by it. In the same way,

Joscha Bach [01:42:23] What you will notice that all his movies have the same main character. So this is in some sense about this character. And the same main character is in this movie Monka, which is the equivalent of Moley, the main character in the Jungle book. The Child Raised by Wolves in this case is a small girl. And this girl is not in, as in the Jungle book, destined to live among people because it rejects the fierceness of the forest and realizes that it wants to be in civilization. But it socialized with the wolves, with our, which are forest Scots and wants to stay with them because it sees the world from their perspective. It's her identity. And it's very different from the Disney version where the forest is actually a pleasant place where everybody is happy, part of the same food chain more or less. And this fierceness, this fity of the world, the the two symmetries of the world are very well preserved in Monka. But the main character is the same in now Zika, where she is a princess in the post apocalyptic world. And it's the same in total where she is an older sister of, in a family where the mother is in hospital and the father tries to write his PhD in a small village or in sent to Chi Kakai. It's what is, she was, I think it's Hir American and where she is a a daughter of two parents who are going accidentally into a magical kingdom and make a mistake and are getting transmogrified into picks and she has to save them.

Joscha Bach [01:43:58] This main character is, is very interesting because she is in some sense, in his own aesthetic, the ideal prototype of a human being because she is completely innocent. She is somebody who is very pure in all her interactions. She sometimes she is just a little girl that is trying to build a delivery service. Sometimes she is a little daughter that that's her best to guide her sister. And sometimes she's a messiah, like a ika, but or, and sometimes she's a fierce warrior in the woods living a, a battle that she can only lose and that doesn't matter. But her stance is always the same. There's a certain immaculate thing. And in some sense, I believe that Miyazaki might be the most interesting and important Protestant philosopher that Europe has, even though he's in Japan and he's not religious.

Vance Crowe [01:44:51] Wow.

Joscha Bach [01:44:51] The main character is actually Heidi. It's this character from the Heidi books that he has discovered during his studies for the Heidi movies where he was an animator and he traveled to Europe and probably visited things in Switzerland that have formed her perspective on the world and informed his aesthetics. And Heidi is this character who is relating to others from a pers position of complete innocence. It's a completely non superstitious religiosity where she is has a very personal relationship to God, but God is, doesn't have a form or shape or name or intent, right? It's not superstitious, it's not the Christian mythology or something. It's just this transcendental agency that she's connected to and that she wants to amenitize by building a harmonic world in a way and relating harmonically to the things around her. And this story is tell told from the perspective of those who ultimately surf her who make innocence possible. And the spirit of innocence and agency that she represents is in some sense a spiritual aesthetic that Miyazaki develops throughout all his movies. And I think it becomes transparent when you see all these movies and you realize these movies are not about answering the small questions. They are about answering the big question, how should I relate to this universe that I'm in? Not, how can all the questions of this universe be resolved? Because they cannot, there is no way, right? We live in an anthropic universe. Everything is going to die while new things are growing. But how do I relate to this?

Joscha Bach [01:46:23] And he develops a certain perspective, a certain shape of the soul, a certain idea on how a civilization should work in these movies. And that's what I find very interesting and I find it very compelling.

Vance Crowe [01:46:34] I'm gonna clip all of this and we're gonna have Yoshi's movie reviews and Yoshi's book reviews and it'll be great. Yosha. I am so glad to have to have had you on today. Thank you so much for your, for your time.