Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra

Ever heard of meta-science?

It’s the science of science. In this episode, I interview the meta-scientist James A. Evans who explains how science happens, why smaller teams do big scientific breakthroughs, similarities between startups and scientific endeavors, and what research shows about the path to success.

His research shows how science is not an automatic machine that keeps on generating truth, but is rather a system where social dynamics of how scientists interact with each other determine what they end up discovering.

About the guest

James Evans is the Director of Knowledge Lab, and faculty at the Sociology department at the University of Chicago. His research uses machine learning and large-scale data to understand how groups think and what they know. He studies collective efforts like science and Wikipedia to figure out how collective attention is distributed, how new ideas originate, and how shared habits of reasoning emerge.

What we talk about

0:04 – Introduction
1:49 – How science happens?
5:47 – Why science is going through a replication crisis?
11:33 – Does science generate truths?
15:14 – How does truth get established in any field?
20:04 – Robustness vs replicability
22:12 – Instead of open science, we should have more closed science
26:05 – Why we need diversity in scientific thought and process
28:40 – On risk in science and why failure is actually the success in scientific studies?
29:34 – Funding in science studies vs funding in start-ups
32:39 – How to push the system to increase the risk appetite in science?
37:29 – On having a diverse portfolio of research directions to enable yourself to take more risks
43:40 – Is productivity in science declining?
47:28 – Why prevents getting more breakthroughs in science
50:05 – Increasing failure to increase successful science discoveries
55:34 – We need to treat new start-up theories charitably
58:20 – How is success achieved across various fields?
1:02:34 – Using data from failures to figure success
1:04:35 – Difference between what you are doing vs others is the high ground of success
1:06:35 – Your research on aesthetics of knowledge – what is it and why are you interested in it

What is the long-term future of the US dollar?

In this episode, I talk Lyn Alden who is an engineer in love with finance. She runs an investment research service for individuals and institutions at her website where she covers value investing with a global macroeconomic view.

As a big theme, she has been exploring the strength of the US dollar in the rapidly evolving world order and what the future holds for the world’s reserve currency. She claims that the 2020 decade will see a weakening of the US dollar due to a phenomenon known as the Triffin dilemma and that’s what I discussed with her in this episode.

What we talk about

0:05​ – Introduction 
3:52​ – What is a reserve currency?
10:27​ – How did the US dollar replace hard assets like Gold as a reserve in foreign countries? 
15:10​ – The arrival of fiat currency 
20:37​ – What determines the strength of a currency 
24:38​ – The role of the second World War in strengthening the US currency 
28:33​ – Why did the USA want to push the US dollar as a reserve currency? 
31:51​ – What pressures prevent printing too much money? 
34:34​ – Triffin’s dilemma 
39:20​ – What is the petrodollar system? 
40:04​ – The case for the weakening of the US dollar weakening 
45:53​ – Long-term implication of the US dollar getting weaker? And why has inflation not hit even when there are more US dollars in circulation? 
53:25​ – Who benefits from a weak US dollar? 
57:24​ – How would a weakened dollar influence the dollar’s status as a reserve currency? 
1:01:02​ – Would the US maintain its global reserve currency status or accelerate its desire to not be a global reserve currency? 
1:04:44​ – What happens when the US dollar is not the global reserve currency anymore? 
1:08:40​ – Is the idea of having more reserve currencies a good one? 
1:09:26​ – Do you think a cryptocurrency like bitcoin could also become a kind of reserve?

Should we worry about AI?

Connor Leahy is an AI researcher at EleutherAI, a grass-roots collection of open-source AI researchers. Their current ambitious project is GPT-Neo, where they’re replicating currently closed-access GPT-3 to make it available to everyone.

Connor is deeply interested in the dangers posed by AI systems that don’t share human values and goals. I talked to Connor about AI misalignment and why it poses a potential existential risk for humanity.

What we talk about

00:05 – Introductions
2:55 – AI risk is obvious once you understand it
3:40 – AI risk as a principal-agent problem
4:33 – Intelligence is a double-edged sword
7:52 – How would you define the alignment problem of AI?
9:10 – Orthogonality of intelligence and values
10:15 – Human values are complex
11:15 – AI alignment problem
11:30 – Alignment problem: how do you control a strong system using a weak system
12:42 – Corporations are proto-AGI
14:32 – Collateral benefits of AI safety research
16:25 – Why is solving this problem urgent?
21:32 – We’re exponentially increasing AI model capacity
23:55 – Superintelligent AI as the LEAST surprising outcome
25:20 – Who will fund to build a superintelligence
26:28 – Goodhart’s law
29:19 – Definition of intelligence
33:00 – Unsolvable problems and superintelligence
34:35 – Upper limit of damage caused by superintelligence
38:25 – What if superintelligence has already arrived
41:40 – Why can’t we power off superintelligence if it gets out of hand
45:25 – Industry and academia is doing a terrible job at AI safety
51:25 – Should govt be regulating AI research?
55:55 – Should we shut down or slow AI research?
57:10 – Solutions for AGI safety
1:05:10 – The best case scenario
1:06:55 – Practical implementations of AI safety
1:12:00 – We can’t agree with each other on values, how will AGI agree with us?
1:14:00 – What is EleutherAI?

How important is status-seeking?

Kunal Shah is the founder of CRED, a fintech company in India that’s raised over $225mn. Previously, he started and sold Freecharge, one of the few fintech companies in India with a successful exit. 

He’s a philosophy graduate by education and today probably more people know him for his insights into human behavior and philosophy than for being a founder of two famous startups.

His fundamental belief is that we’re driven primarily by status and even though the idea sounds simple, it has many interesting consequences for society, economy, and individual satisfaction.

What we talk about

0:05 – Introduction
2:04 – What is status and how does it drive human motivation?
11:54 – The role of status in shaping societies
16:21 – Bootstrapping status
18:57 – Why do we want to shape the society in our image?
24:54 – Seeking status to seek immortality
30:00 – Does status inequality exist in societies?
39:53 – Competence vs being popular
42:39 – High trust vs low trust societies and the correlation of status with wealth
54:09 – How to scale trust in low trust societies
1:00:06 – If you had the power to change India as a country, what would you do?
1:07:20 – What factors do you attribute to your success with raising the money vs the other entrepreneurs?
1:11:24 – Do the negative messages/comments on social media impact you psychologically?
1:12:54 – What is CRED and why did you build it?
1:18:47 – How did you justify making a huge investment in IPL ads? And how did this play out?

Do we see reality as it is?

I discuss this question with Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He studies consciousness and perception from an evolutionary point of view. His research has led him to make a bold claim that while we do not yet know what the underlying reality could be like. Rather, reality as we know it now – including space, time, and objects – is a useful fiction that evolution invented for us.

His TED talk on our perception of reality has been watched over 3 million times, and in his recent pop-science book for the wider audience, The Case Against Reality, he makes a convincing case on how our perceived reality is an illusion that has evolved to help us survive and reproduce.

1:46 – Towards building a mathematical understanding perception
5:12 – Evolutionary game theory to help understand perception
6:26 – Computing truth is expensive, so evolution get rids of it
8:00 – Mathematical proof that evolution doesn’t tune us to see the truth
9:56 – David Marr’s ideas and inverse optics
11:30 – What are fitness payoffs? Why do they matter? How are they determined?
16:23 – Maximizing for truth vs maximizing for winning
18:40 – Illusions that show physical reality doesn’t exist
23:21 – Physical reality not being fundamental as a scientific claim
24:23 – Existing physics points to spacetime not being fundamental
30:25 – The basics of the interface theory of perception
34:40 – We have to guess mathematically the deeper structure of reality
38:00 – Model-free planning in reinforcement learning
44:45 – Why should we care about what is objective reality?
49:20 – How can we use science to go beyond physical reality?
56:57 – Reality is a huge social network of conscious agents
1:03:41 – Predictions from the mathematics of conscious agents
1:09:26 – “We will be able to warp space and time”
1:09:35 – Bridging conscious agents to physical reality
1:15:32 – How far along have we come in his journey of building a fundamental theory of reality based on consciousness?
1:17:31 – Is mathematics part of the underlying reality or is it a useful fiction too?
1:30:12 – Does your research on reality and consciousness impact your personal life and beliefs?

Do surgeries work? Most of us assume they do, but is there any scientific evidence that they do?

In this episode, I talk to Dr Ian Harris who is a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a practicing orthopedic surgeon specializing in trauma surgery. Outside his practice, his research interests broadly cover the topic of surgical effectiveness and clinical research.

1:38 – Science as a way of knowing things
9:15 – Why medical professionals refuse to believe scientific evidence?
15:05 – What is a placebo?
19:16 – How strong is the placebo effect in surgeries?
22:05 – History of bloodletting in medicine and how we stopped this practice
24:31 – The myths of knee surgery
28:26 – Why doctors need to be held accountable
32:26 – Why are there no regulatory authorities in surgery like there are in new medicine?
35:14 – Latest studies on why half of the surgeries are ineffective
41:00 – Need for randomized trials for discovering which surgeries actually work
44:48 – Why is surgery the ultimate placebo?
47:12 – How much effort does it take to do a meta-analysis or a systematic review?
47:29 – How to improve meta-reviews via living systematic reviews
49:54 – What should you be asking your doctor if you are recommended a surgery?

In the first episode of Bold Conjectures, I talk to Dr Anders Sandberg who is a Senior Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University.  His academic collaborators include nanotechnology pioneer Eric Dexler and the philosopher Nick Bostrom.

The audio quality isn't perfect in this one as this is my first podcast. It should get better from here :)

== We talk about ==
- Why intelligent life may be rare in the universe
- What should we do as humans if that's indeed the case
- How to model likely outcomes of the future of humanity

== Papers by Dr Anders Sandberg mentioned in the episode ==
- The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare
- Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
- Blueberry Earth

== Social media profiles ==
- Paras Chopra: https://twitter.com/paraschopra
- Anders Sandberg: https://twitter.com/anderssandberg

== Credits ==
Thanks to Sachin Vats (https://twitter.com/sachinvats97) for editing