Change My Mind

A conversation between Bayan Furutan and Alex Buxeda on whether an "ought" can be derived from an "is," whether free will exists, and what it would take to prove it doesn't.

Alex argues, along Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky lines, that free will is an illusion: we are patterns of matter running a nested hierarchy of priors, from physics to biology to culture, and every choice is ruled by cause and effect. Awareness of the universe, on this view, collapses the is and the ought into one. Bayan holds free will as an axiom, accepted the way we accept that our senses reflect reality, and sets a high bar for disproving it: predict my behavior as reliably as we predict a planet's orbit.

Between those poles the conversation ranges across the thermostat as the smallest unit of decision, natural selection and entropy, poker and game theory, the abortion debate as a case of "a spectrum matching a spectrum," the Mormons as a test of whether a false belief can still be fit, and whether you act as if you have agency, or watching yourself act?

Chapters:

0:00 Can an ought be derived from an is?

1:51 The man hit by a car: same "is," different "oughts"

4:55 Every ought needs an "if": survival as the hidden premise

7:05 Paying back what it took to build you: entropy and natural selection

9:21 "What are you doing" vs. "why are you doing it"

11:53 Deriving the why from the what, and how bandwidth changes the answer

13:47 Co-evolution: black holes, universes, and turtles all the way down

16:16 Why criticism needs an alternative: the Enlightenment proposal

18:47 Free will as the real crux: is it required for an "ought"?

20:34 Hard determinism, Sam Harris, and "if you were Stalin"

22:15 Experience vs. proof: why Bayan holds free will as an axiom

27:43 Defining free will: what would non-free will even mean?

28:39 The thermostat as the smallest unit of decision

29:46 Is consciousness computational? Penrose and the counter

31:07 Poker, game theory, and modeling the other player

32:06 The real dividing line: can you act against your nature?

37:11 Zooming out: the lineage that never jumps into the street

40:19 Signal, noise, and why bigger samples reveal the laws of nature

42:04 Are you a set of instructions? The direct question

45:40 "Yes." Sapolsky and the nested hierarchy of priors

54:36 Diminishing returns toward 100%: chipping at the variance

1:00:07 A thought experiment: what correlation would settle it?

1:01:00 The god-of-the-gaps objection and spontaneous generation

1:03:43 Predictability across a lifetime: fetus, mid-20s, old age

1:07:16 At what point does free will emerge? The abortion parallel

1:10:42 A spectrum must be matched by a spectrum: the speeding-ticket model

1:18:17 Where does a human start having rights and obligations?

1:23:32 A reasonable hypothesis, but not proof: the high threshold

1:26:35 Markets, courts, and how truth is discovered collectively

1:30:11 The beehive: how a spectrum emerges from

I am joined by neuroscientist Karl Friston to discuss, from first principles, what trust is.

The trust we put in others, and in our institutions, is a sociological feature emergent from biology. It is here that predictions first appear.

This conversation inspired an article we co-wrote:

⁠https://schweizermonat.ch/trust-is-a-law-of-nature/

0:00 What is trust, in active inference terms?

1:07 Trust in your own future: planning as inference

2:16 Confidence, precision, and the shape of a belief

3:45 Two ways to minimize surprise: seeking info vs. avoiding surprise

5:48 Epistemic trust: choosing where to get your news

6:24 Scale invariance: from eye movements to which institutions you trust

8:20 Trust as a meta-judgment of your past predictions

9:11 The statistician's view: estimating risk, not just reward

10:56 When second-order inference fails: hallucinations and neglect

12:50 Delusional institutions: the same mechanics in markets and geopolitics

13:45 Precision as attention: what you trust is what you attend to

14:56 Rediscovering natural selection from a different angle

17:20 Bayesian model selection is nature's way of selecting phenotypes

19:58 Why the free energy principle complies with itself

21:14 Donald Hoffman, mortal computation, and neuronal chauvinism

22:31 We are the substrate: predicting ourselves into existence

24:07 Everything is a hypothesis, including time and the self

25:10 Do we see truth? What can be ignored isn't true

26:13 There is no truth, only the best inference for me

27:33 Synchronization of chaos: coupling your brain to the world

28:45 A joint free energy solution: becoming mutually predictable

29:38 Aligned interests: why you trust the table, your liver, and me

31:52 Negative valence: trusting that a lion wants to eat you

32:47 Shorting the BBC: the cost of distrust

33:33 Fake news, epistemic trust, and the pillars of autocracy

34:15 Sharing a generative model: how we become predictable to each other

35:47 Defining yourself by the states you refuse to occupy

38:04 Is this source generated by someone like me?

38:36 Why echo chambers are Bayes-optimal until communities open

39:54 Too many choices: why it's awful for young people now

40:58 Friston: no phone, no social media, no awful uncertainty

41:15 Australia's under-16 social media ban, seen mathematically

42:06 Information like capital: who should handle how much

42:48 The pathology: social media attracts more capital when you lose

43:28 Markets are grown up, social media is pre-adolescent

44:11 Science as selection: theories as surviving hypotheses

44:35 Is religion "true"? The fitness of a simple generative model

46:03 Narrowing choice: why fewer options relieves angst

47:05 "You are your own existence proof"

48:07 Collapsing is and ought: first survive, then philosophize

49:08 "I am, therefore I think"

50:23 The relational aspect: no standalone measure of goodness

53:30 Hardware and software differ only in speed of change

54:33 The renormalization group: same rules at every scale

55:07 Separation of temporal scales: growing slow, learning fast

56:15 What we inherit is learnability, not a finished world model

57:40 Why foolishness was selected for: the reckless years

59:21 "Did evolution fool us?" The value of unsophisticated agents

1:00:24 Variance creates arbitrage: Pinker and common knowledge

1:01:25 Closing thoughts

Lukas Leuzinger and Alex Buxeda interview Cass Sunstein for Schweizer Monat. They dissect the mechanics of liberalism. Sunstein defines a tradition that encompasses Hayek and Burke. He counters the claims of Patrick Deneen. He argues that choice does not destroy faith or family. The dialogue shifts to nudges. Sunstein explains how choice architecture assists humans without it being manipulation. They analyze speech standards. They contrast the First Amendment with the laws of Switzerland and Germany. Sunstein outlines the divisions of power. He warns against the expansion of the executive.

Buy Sunstein's latest book: On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom

Check Sunstein's books here

Barbara Kolm, President of the Austrian School of Economics, joins Alex Buxeda to dismantle the myths of monetary nationalism, expose the political incentives behind inflation, and explain why trust collapses when money becomes a political tool.

They explore Carl Menger’s legacy, why money is a discovery not an invention, how time and information shape economic order, and why Europe is quietly drifting toward central planning through the “law of rules”.
From Bitcoin’s “don’t trust, verify,” to demographic decline, taxation traps, bureaucratic overreach, CBDCs, nudging theory, and the collapse of competitiveness in Europe, this episode is a deep dive into the institutions that shape freedom, responsibility, and prosperity.  

0:00 Monetary nationalism and why debasing your currency backfires

1:54 What sound money is, and why states debase it

4:01 Menger vs. Knapp: money as discovery, not law

7:52 Time, value, and why information spreads slowly

10:01 Stability, the rule of law, and the "law of rules"

11:59 Brussels, central planning, and the lost subsidiarity principle

15:17 Europe's demographic collapse and falling productivity

17:46 Taxes on labor and why no one works more

20:03 The hidden costs in tax and social security

22:04 Capital flees to where it's best treated: Venezuela

23:31 Price tags on government: making the cost visible

27:08 Social justice, responsibility, and providing opportunity vs. redistribution

32:04 Fractional reserve, cash limits, and destroying property rights

34:35 CBDCs, self-sovereignty, and why cash is the ultimate settlement

38:11 Nudging as central planning: Spain's blackout and Germany's solar

41:52 Closing thoughts

In this episode, Tobe joins me to discuss how consilience collapses concepts, the nature of entropy, markets as anticipation machines, biology as a model of past environments that survives by matching the present and future, the division of labor freeing mental bandwidth, energy as the basis of value, and the provisional nature of all knowledge.

0:00 Defining entropy: not disorder, but the fall toward the probable

2:07 Local order vs. global decay: the zero-sum game

4:19 One model, and the case against synonyms

4:53 Is model-building epistemologically bankrupt?

6:37 "Your longing for capital-T truth is quasi-religious"

7:46 There's no way out of building a model

10:55 Why zero-sum can be rejected empirically

13:24 Entropy, time, and space as the same thing

16:07 Local order: life reversing the global trend

20:00 Big bang, heat death, and where life emerges between

21:23 The coffee and milk: beauty before mixing

23:24 Markets as anticipation machines: shorting the CEO

25:45 Short vs. portfolio: two different activities

27:54 Market makers set the price, not the uncertainty

30:57 Prediction as the wiring of the brain

34:09 Dispelling uncertainty and replacing it with control

36:26 Shepherd and sheep: does the shepherd choose his power?

38:16 Free will underlies entropy: escaping cause and effect

41:15 Dennett and why free will has been a distraction

43:46 Freedom from what? Coercion, violence, and flourishing

48:00 Switzerland's tax on labor and the myth of the simple rule

51:11 The hidden meta-tax of thinking about tax

53:31 Everything is simplification: the laptop and division of labor

56:37 Evaluating worthiness: marginal returns vs. speculation

59:04 The Microsoft vs. Apple mistake: looking deeper

1:01:09 You always build with tools you don't understand

1:04:42 Why complexity is manufactured: people want power over you

1:07:14 Obscure writing, French culture, and Dawkins

1:09:44 Free speech: the purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die

1:11:00 Energy as the basis of value: the 50,000-calorie meal

1:17:03 Why slavery isn't profitable in the long run

1:18:52 Did you arrive at a truth, or just short a bad strategy?

1:23:57 Is the economy zero-sum? Ingenuity as the ultimate resource

1:25:24 Marxism, surplus, and why a free market corrects it

1:29:52 The dot-com implosion: the market, or delusion?

1:33:36 Physics vs. models: the underlying and the error

1:36:00 Silly ideas: religion, Marxism, and the baby with the bathwater

1:39:16 "Isn't this just: knowledge is provisional?"

1:42:13 Two centuries of plummeting costs: the map must fit reality

1:44:04 The religious view vs. the Spinozan empiricist view

1:50:32 Is the heat death empirical, or a conjecture?

1:53:16 The alien who made your bed: the unfalsifiable claim

1:57:02 Bayesian priors and why the hypothetical adds nothing

2:03:28 Past and future as symmetrical in uncertainty

2:06:28 What a hedge actually is: the dangerous street

2:08:41 Managing downside vs. engineering the upside

2:11:46 Taleb's bet: knowing who goes bankrupt, not who gets rich

2:13:05 The engineer who touches reality vs. the abstracted manager

2:16:00 The mechanic and the manager: different data, not a hierarchy

2:19:16 An ever-richer prior, not an ever-simpler model

2:23:05 Wittgenstein: words have no meaning on their own

2:24:09 Why LLMs work: the latent space, not a simple model

2:28:04 Could we rebuild it if it broke? The blueprint survives

2:28:55 Is 10% a good test of importance? Tech, Nvidia, the limit

2:33:29 Subsidizing bad engineers so the good ones stay

2:34:09 Back to entropy: God is dead, humans just do their thing

Today, I had a conversation with Fengzheng Gao. Fengzheng is a researcher specializing in Microalgal Biotechnology, and he holds two doctorates, one in Bioprocess Engineering and another one in Aquatic Product Processing and Storage Engineering. He has contributed to over 20 scientific publications.

We talked about the potential of microalgae in optimizing the food chain in order to provide abundant food to the poorest at an accessible cost, how microalgae can supplement the iron intake of the people suffering from iron deficiencies better than conventional iron supplements, the vastly promising future of algae strains in solving any nutritional problem we might face, bioengineering as a solution to climate change and much more.

Check Gao's

Linkedin

Google Scholar Profile⁠

0:00 Microalgae for iron deficiency: spirulina beats the control

1:26 Why microalgae could revolutionize food

5:22 100 times more iron than beef, and other valuable compounds

7:17 Concentration vs. absorption: bioavailability explained

9:14 Filling the gap between algae production and nutrition science

11:11 Why maximizing one number tells you almost nothing

13:03 A luminous cube of algae: the efficiency of photosynthesis

15:52 Selecting strains by natural selection instead of gene editing

20:00 Why lab-selected strains count as "wild type" and are allowed

21:52 Where spirulina came from: the lakes of Mexico and Africa

23:47 Why spirulina is a master food source

25:44 Iron deficiency affects two billion people

27:55 Why women and children suffer most

28:34 A speculation on epigenetic adaptation to blood loss

30:55 Human ingenuity as the last bottleneck

35:08 Iron as the growth bottleneck of the oceans

38:19 Iron dumping to fight climate change: a crazy idea

39:53 Algae, not rainforests, are the lungs of the Earth

41:00 Extreme strains: algae from a volcano at pH 1.5

42:56 Could a super-fit mutant take over the world?

46:36 Nature's balance and the MMA analogy

47:31 Closing thoughts

Abel Abelson, a neurodivergent writer and YouTuber, has navigated the unique challenges of being distinct from the majority, on which our conversation focuses mainly. He was recognized by Mensa with an IQ of 133, which places him in the 98th percentile in terms of cognitive ability.

Today we talked about whether every problem can be solved through further understanding, how one can be content with the fact that one will be discontent, the apparent incompatibility of acceptance and performance, how to define happiness, the need for enough similarities between two people to have a successful relationship, the pursuit of transcendent threads of logic, how the reason you like football has nothing to do with football and all to do with the fact that you are an ape, the huge variance among people in curiosity and intelligence and the best way to approach it, disgustingness of the anti-egalitarian nature of the massive differences in intelligence across the population, the leverage of your actions as a measure of your intelligence, the nature of trauma, the power of mindfulness, the self-fulfilling effect of believing that you have a problem, progressive voluntary exposure as a solution to fear and trauma, the incoherence of free will as uncaused behavior, the need for immediate regulation of our emotions after a dramatically negative event to avoid trauma, the need to update our knowledge faster than every 1000 years, the perpetual ability to establish dialogue if you criticize the antibodies of the incendiary ideas, and the incoherence of the Naturalistic fallacy.

You can find Abel on ⁠YouTube⁠

Buy Abel’s books on ⁠Amazon

0:00 Can everything be solved through understanding?

7:54 Suffering, acceptance, and via negativa

14:48 Happiness: wholeness vs. progress toward a goal

23:46 Curiosity, parochialism, and knowledge that travels

34:03 Intelligence, moral value, and the research on IQ

54:58 The mind is flat: perception, brains in jars, Feynman

1:21:08 Trauma, implicit memory, and the silent treatment

1:41:15 Pain, self-inflicted affliction, and the psychiatric industry

1:52:51 Evil, sadism, and the child who makes sense of abuse

2:14:50 The limits of rationality: always after the fact

2:29:57 The scientific method, religion, and the pork taboo

2:44:15 Peterson, atheism, and how to arrange society

2:51:52 The Nazi with the gun: dogmatism, fear, and dialogue

Today I am joined by my friend Abdi.

In this conversation we talked about: that what causes suffering is the interpretation of the facts, not the facts themselves, framing free will as the ability to ditch a vice, how we don't choose to choose-proving the inexistence of free will as unconstrained decisions, how uncaused behavior is an incoherent concept as a round square, how 99% of the cost of vice is in the creation of future vice, the end of history illusion, how the misalignment between feedback and reality is THE civilizational problem, how we are drowning in information-related to the paradox of choice that emerges from more abundance than one can handle, the explore-exploit tradeoff, how we should be open to being surprised, how as Aristotle said the sweet spot is in the mean between the extremes, how morality is a navigation problem, how trying to falsify stereotypes can be extremely valuable, how we should treat others as if we could learn something from them, the need for both conservatism and progressivism, how blaming is mostly useless, how virtue is always in our hands.

Today I had the pleasure to have a conversation with Harvey Silverglate, he is an American attorney, author, and civil liberties advocate. He is best known for his work in defending individual rights and freedom of speech. Silverglate has been involved in numerous high-profile cases and has written extensively on issues related to civil liberties and the criminal justice system.

He co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 1999, an organization dedicated to protecting free speech and due process rights.

He has also written several books, including Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent⁠, ⁠Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse⁠ and ⁠The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses⁠.

We talked about The similarities between free speech, the scientific method and traditional liberal values, How the decentralized marketplace of ideas is better at finding truth than centralized power, How interests are aligned in the long term, How intolerance to opposing ideas fuels censorship, The impossibility of China overcoming the US as the world's superpower due to the internal corruptness of its system, The primacy of freedom over material abundance even if they are complementary, The need for the smallest units to be subjected to a process of natural selection so that bigger ones can prevail as in ‘‘The purpose of dialogue is to let ideas die instead of us’’, How dogmatism forced Larry Summers to resign his position as president from harvard, Harvey’s marriage advice, That a Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his actions, How administrators drain colleagues' resources, The counter productive and racist nature of affirmative action, The role of freedom of speech in allowing non-mainstream opinions to be voiced, Meritocracy, And how we have nothing apart from dialogue as an alternative to violence.