My conversation with @naval. Enjoy!

(0:00) - The Theory of Everything
(4:48) - How do you know what’s true?
(7:51) - Groups search for consensus, individuals search for truth
(13:07) - We have never run out of a single resource
(15:25) - Are we destroying the Earth?
(17:48) - Marxism denies wealth creation
(21:28) - Regulation kills innovation
(27:05) - Degrowth and the fall of Western universities
(33:31) - Why the West is best
(35:47) - Federalism
(38:10) - Everyone wants to live forever
(41:44) - Humans are universal explainers
(43:25) - Collectivism vs. individualism
(50:44) - You cannot explain the universe without explaining humans
(55:02) - How @DavidDeutschOxf’s ideas have changed Naval’s life
(1:02:31) - The scientific method isn’t possible
(1:05:07) - The low-hanging fruit theory is a bad explanation
(1:08:19) - The biggest threats to Western civilization YouTube:

Karl Popper didn’t just reject induction. He solved the so-called problem of induction.

Popper never rejected knowledge. He rejected justified true belief. Any finite number of observations can be accommodated within an indefinitely large number of different explanations. All observation is theory-laden.

While working at @getairchat, I compiled a series of aphorisms from @naval about our company culture and policies. Here they are: Be a doer. Take massive accountability.

The Meaning of It All by Richard Feynman; a summary: Richard P. Feynman was one of the 20th century's most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. He all but rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamics. It was for this work that he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965.

It wouldn’t be a revelation to many of you if I say schools kill creativity.

“Modern” school markets itself as a place where creativity and critical thinking are developed. But that’s false.

Creativity cannot flourish in a place where you’re told what you’re supposed to do. In such an institution, criticism is also shunned, and the authority is almost never questioned.

When, on a rare occasion, it is questioned by a child, the child is said to have “behavioral issues”.

If you follow the thesis “the way to be happy is to sacrifice your happiness for the happiness of other people” to its logical conclusion for everyone—nobody in the world is ever going to be happy. Imagine happiness as a small box 📦, since I want to be a “good person”, and “good people are unselfish”, I will pass the box to my neighbor.

You reflect on some of the misconceptions you had in the past and you think, “Man, how could I have been so blind and have accepted all these commonly held beliefs that contradict each other and are utterly wrong?” But they didn’t seem contradictory in the past. For the past “you” with all those theories that formed your worldview, that was it. That was the world.

Constraints are not inherently a bad thing. The discovery of and conforming to certain constraints actually propels progress. When we learn how certain physical transformations are impossible, our freedom and potential actually grows.

I asked @david_perell what he would do if he were a 15 year old in high school again.

He immediately said, he’d write on the Internet. And then described a specific route he’d take to do so successfully.

Here are a couple of key points I got from our conversation: - Summarize ideas of other people

"I think it’s easy to say, 'Hey, I’m just going to try to find original ideas,' but you don’t need to start there. You can actually build an audience and really start learning just by summarizing the ideas of other people."

Podcast with @david_perell out now!

Topics:
- David’s new writing course for high schoolers
- How the Internet is the best thing that happened to education
- Writing online and effective ways to do so
- How to tackle long term goals
- ChatGPT and more!

Timestamps including more of a description of what we talk about:

This is something I *have to* copy in my school psychology project.

Since it would be no good criticizing that which I have to blindly copy in my project, I'll criticize the below paragraph in this thread instead.

An example of instrumentalism, an aspect of bad philosophy: The description of a scientific theory above completely misses the most important aspect of it.

It's explanation.

According to it, it doesn't matter what the explanation is as long as we make the correct predictions.

A Taoist story about the complex, integrated, delayed and uncertain nature of consequences: Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. It ran away. And all the neighbors came around that evening and said "that's too bad."

“All criticism aims at destruction
for the purpose of construction.

Or at least this is the ideal case. Criticism aims to destroy a less good idea to replace it with a newly constructed better, truer idea.

Can we write books like ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ for kids? Why teach them all that deduction/induction and stuff and make their eyes open only when they get older? Why not just make them understand now? Why not give them real knowledge about knowledge now? This tweet is deeper than that particular book.

Yesterday, my little sister learned something about evolution in school. She was talking about the “ape to human” chart. I said that’s misleading and not a good way to understand the theory…