We're joined by the wonderful Lulie Tanett to talk about effective altruism, pulling spouses out of burning buildings, and why you should prefer critical rationalism to Bayesianism for your mom's sake. Buckle up!

We discuss:

References

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Report your beliefs and focus your Gendlin's at [email protected].

Special Guest: Lulie Tanett.

Support Increments

Keith is the CEO & Co-Founder of OpenStore and a General Partner at Founders Fund. He is an experienced technology executive and entrepreneur, a prolific investor, and a self-described contrarian. Keith previously served as a General Partner at Khosla Ventures. Before that, he was COO at Square and served in influential roles at LinkedIn. He also co-founded Opendoor. Keith began his career in technology as a senior executive at PayPal. He has since invested early in many great companies including YouTube, Airbnb, Palantir, DoorDash, Stripe, Quora, Yammer, Affirm, Eventbrite, and many others. He also served as a Board Member from inception to IPO at Yelp and Xoom. Follow Keith on Twitter @rabois.

[0:00] - OpenStore's early momentum and fundraising strategy

[5:35] - How an decentralized department store could unlock eCommerce growth

[12:33] - Introducing OpenStore Drive and why it is great for Shopify store owners

[16:49] - OpenStore's horizontal approach and why Keith believes it is best

[18:41] - OpenStore’s business acquisition strategy and thoughtful process design

[24:09] - How learnings from OpenStore’s initial acquisitions have led to improvements

[28:56] - Why OpenStore’s business is resilient in various macroeconomic environments

[35:06] - Acquisition offers and accept rates as metrics and countermetrics at OpenStore

[38:45] - Introducing Gumdrop which matches long-tail influencers to long-tail SKUs

[41:40] - The advantages of aggregation that benefit OpenStore’s business model

[45:19] - Building a great company culture; finding & developing undiscovered talent

[51:11] - The most high-leverage activities Keith allocates time to as OpenStore's CEO

homeofjake.com

I interview physicist and science writer Sabine Hossenfelder. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, where she leads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group and researches quantum gravity. We discuss ideas from her book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, such as the role of philosophical ideas of beauty, naturalness, and elegance in fundamental physics and the sociological factors that affect scientific research. We also discuss often misunderstood ideas in fundamental physics, such as the difference between a Grand Unified Theory and a Theory of Everything, and the difference between time-invariance and time reversibility. 

Dr. Hossenfelder's Twitter - @skdh

Dr. Hossenfelder's book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray - https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray-ebook/dp/B0763L6YR7

Dr. Hossenfelder's website - http://sabinehossenfelder.com

Dr. Hossendelder's blog - http://backreaction.blogspot.com

My appearance on Christofer Lovgren's podcast, Do Explain - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-big-three-case-against-government-logan-chipkin/id1482313214?i=1000457352171

My recent article with Areo Magazine, People and the Cosmos: Constructor Theory - https://areomagazine.com/2019/11/25/people-and-the-cosmos-constructor-theory/

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/Fallibleanimals

Twitter - https://twitter.com/ChipkinLogan

Articles - www.loganchipkin.com

I had fun chatting with my friend Logan Chipkin about various topics and misconceptions related to the growth of knowledge and wealth including: 

Subscribe to Scaling Knowledge: https://scalingknowledge.substack.com

Follow Logan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChipkinLogan

Follow Moritz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoritzW42

This is my interview with David Deutsch, Visiting Professor of physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation, the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. We discuss the constructor theory of information, some of its conjectured principles, the unification of classical and quantum information, and more.   

Constructor Theory of Information paper - https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1405/1405.5563.pdf

I interview Oxford physicist Chiara Marletto, who has been working on constructor theory for several years. She's published papers on its applications to various fields, including those of information, thermodynamics, life, and probability. We discuss the origins and motivations of constructor theory, problems the theory may solve, current research programs, the universal constructor, response to potential criticisms, why constructor theory can explain more of Reality than the prevailing conception, and more. 

Constructor Theory Homepage - www.constructortheory.org

Constructor Theory of Thermodynamics - http://constructortheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Thd-ArXiv-2.pdf

Constructor Theory of Probability - http://constructortheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20150883.full_.pdf

Constructor Theory of Life - http://constructortheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ct-life.pdf

Constructor Theory of Information - http://constructortheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ct-info.pdf

Twitter - https://twitter.com/ChipkinLogan

Articles - www.loganchipkin.com

We discuss the difference between laws versus principles as elucidated by constructor theory, and why it matters. Constructor theory may be thought of as a 'theory of theories' whose principles constrain other theories. Just as these subsidiary, object-level theories constrain the behavior of physical phenomena, so too constructor theory, as a meta-level theory, constrains the behavior of object-level theories both known and unknown. Constructor theoretic principles can also constrain and solve problems with theories that explain inherently unpredictable phenomena, such as those of biology, economics, and epistemology.

My patreon page - https://www.patreon.com/Fallibleanimals

Economic Creationism - https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/economic-creationism/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/ChipkinLogan

Articles - www.loganchipkin.com

Foundational Paper on Constructor Theory - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.7439.pdf

Constructor Theory of Life - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0681.pdf

The Upright Thinkers - https://www.amazon.com/Upright-Thinkers-Journey-Living-Understanding/dp/0307908232

I speak with physicist David Deutsch about the universal constructor, a machine that can be programmed to cause any physically possible transformation.  

Note-this interview was recorded in early 2022.

In the time since this interview was recorded, David has stated that disobedience is by far the primary reason that humans and human societies aren't universal constructors. 

David Deutsch's website - https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/.

Constructor theory website - https://www.constructortheory.org/.

Logan Chipkin's website - www.loganchipkin.com/.

David Deutsch Twitter - https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf.

Logan Chipkin Twitter - https://twitter.com/ChipkinLogan.

In this episode, we continue our discussion of Dwarkesh Patel's article "Contra David Deutsch on AI" compared to Brett Hall's tweet on IQ theory. This time we concentrate on criticisms of Patel's Hardware+Scaling hypothesis. To Patel's credit, he admits that his hypothesis is problematic. 

Then Peter asks Bruce about why Brett Hall believes explanatory universality implies 'equal intellectual capacity'. Bruce gives a steelmanned version of Brett's theory that takes us through an explanation of what explanatory universality is and how it relates to computational universality and the Turing Principle. 

Dwarkesh Patel published an article called "Contra David Deutsch on AI". This article was actually a defense of IQ theory against the charge (often made by fans of David Deutsch) that the existence of Explanatory Universality destroys IQ theory entirely. But how accurately does Dwarkesh portray Deutsch's view? (For that matter, how accurately do fans of David Deutsch portray Deutsch's viewpoint?) And how good are Patel's criticisms of Deutsch's view? 

With some help from a tweet from Brett Hall on IQ theory, we compare and contrast Patel's and Hall's viewpoints and lay out the disagreements that exist. 

Brett argues that Explanatory Universality implies we are all equally intelligent (i.e. have an equal capacity to learn) and that the only difference between people is our levels of interest in the knowledge that currently society happens to value. Is he correct? Or are the experiments cited by Patel wrong? If so, how?

Or to put this another way, if we did demonstrate via an experiment that some people do gain knowledge faster than others (as Patel claims), would that refute the theory of explanatory universality? Or are Brett's claims not actually implications of explanatory universality?