It's only taken us 104 episodes of talking incessantly about Karl Popper to get one of the most important and popular criticisms of falsification: The Duhem-Quine thesis. Should we wrap the podcast here? Is it game over?

People involved in a fruitful critical discussion of a problem often rely, if only unconsciously, upon two things: the acceptance by all parties of the common aim of getting at the truth, or at least nearer to the truth, and a considerable amount of common background knowledge. This does not mean that either of these two things is an indispensable basis of every discussion, or that these two things are themselves ‘a priori’, and cannot be critically discussed in their turn. It only means that criticism never starts from nothing, even though every one of its starting points may be challenged, one at a time, in the course of the critical debate.

While discussing a problem we always accept (if only temporarily) all kinds of things as unproblematic: they constitute for the time being, and for the discussion of this particular problem, what I call our background knowledge. Few parts of this background knowledge will appear to us in all contexts as absolutely unproblematic, and any particular part of it may be challenged at any time, especially if we suspect that its uncritical acceptance may be responsible for some of our difficulties. But almost all of the vast amount of background knowledge which we constantly use in any informal discussion will, for practical reasons, necessarily remain unquestioned; and the misguided attempt to question it all—that is to say, to start from scratch—can easily lead to the breakdown of a critical debate. (Were we to start the race where Adam started, I know of no reason why we should get any further than Adam did.)

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Did you ever see the video of two regular people trying to fight Eddie Hall, the strongest man on earth? Ben and Vaden bring that same energy to this conversation, where they gang up on Robert Wright on the subject of his forthcoming book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. Bob is a sport about it (well, there was no choice really: we have an advanced copy of his book that we're holding hostage) and there are only one or two black eyes by the end.

Subscribe to Robert Wright's podcasting empire NonZero on youtube and substack. And go buy one of his many books.

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Special Guest: Robert Wright.

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Turning on our own! Vaden sits down with Bruce Nielson and Peter Johansen to discuss some of the bad memes that run rampant in the online "crit-rat" community, in an attempt of some intra-tribal error-correction. Ben, scared of the retribution, runs away with his tail uncomfortably close to his thighs.

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I before E except after B? Send your best guess as to the spelling of Bruce's last name (no one knows) over to [email protected].

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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Wasn't Popper a falsificationist? Then why did he try to develop ideas about corroboration and versimilitude - the extent to which a theory was closer to truth than another theory? Isn't this verging dangerously close to verificationist territory?

In our fourth ep on Chapter 10 in C&R, we wrestle with Popper's treatment of verisimilutude, both the formal and informal versions. Did the project fail? Was Popper out of his mind? Does this invalidate everything?

Like many other philosophers I am at times inclined to classify philosophers as belonging to two main groups—those with whom I disagree, and those who agree with me.

I shall give here a somewhat unsystematic list of six types of cases in which we should be inclined to say of a theory t1 that it is superseded by t2 in the sense that t2 seems—as far as we know—to correspond better to the facts than t1 , in some sense or other.

- C&R, page 315

Let me first say that I do not suggest that the explicit introduction of the idea of verisimilitude will lead to any changes in the theory of method. On the contrary, I think that my theory of testability or corroboration by empirical tests is the proper methodological counterpart to this new metalogical idea. The only improvement is one of clarification.

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100 episodes! To celebrate, Vaden tries to get personal with Ben, while Ben dodges his questions and wants to know how Vaden feels about incest. All in all, a pretty typical episode.

From Vaden to Ben:

From Ben to Vaden:

What is your favorite form of ince... actually nevermind, too much. Just email us at [email protected].

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Ben is hesitant to talk too much about politics on the podcast. So, naturally, we're having a political debate. We have on a pseudonymous guest to talk Trump, MAGA, and what's wrong with the left and the right.

Cross the border into the increments discord and hit us up at [email protected].

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"What is Truth?", said jesting podcasters, who then stuck around for an answer. Back at it again with The Conjectures and Refutations Series (part three) on Chapter 10: Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Can we say what truth is, even if we can never be certain we've found it? If not, can we say that science is approaching truth? How would we ever know? And why are so many theories of truth untrue?

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Two years without discussing effective altruism -- did you miss it? Not as much as Vaden, surely. And probably a right bit more than Ben.

Well, we're back in the game with a spicy one. Was EA a front for AI safety from the beginning? Did the leaders care not a wit for global poverty? Is Ben going to throw himself out window if Vaden keeps this up?

new effective altruists tend to start off concerned about global poverty or animal suffering and then hear, take seriously, and often are convinced by the arguments for existential risk mitigation

Existential risk isn’t the most useful public face for effective altruism – everyone inc[l]uding Eliezer Yudkowsky agrees about that

Utilitymonster: GWWC is explicitly poverty-focused but high impact careers (HIC) is not. In fact, hardcore members of GWWC are heavily interested in x-risk, and I estimate that 10-15% of its general membership is as well. I’d take them seriously as a group for promoting utilitarianism in general.

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Happy Christmas and Merry Festivus y'all! Today we're releasing a patreon episode, as both of us are away on vacation with the family for the holidays. In this episode we have a meandering discussion about parenting, Robert Kegan's four stages of development, the limits of introspection, and relationship counseling.

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After a long hiatus where we both saw grief counsellors over our fight about Popper's theory of content in the last C&R episode, we are back. And we're ready to play nice ... for about 30 seconds until Vaden admits that two sentences from Popper changed his mind about something Ben had arguing for literally years.

But eventually putting those disagreements aside, we return to the subject at hand: The Conjectures and Refutations Series: Chapter 10: Truth, Rationality, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Part II). Here all goes smoothly. Just kidding, we start fighting about content again almost immediately. Where are the guests to break us up when you need them.

Consciousness, world 2, was presumably an evaluating and discerning consciousness, a problem-solving consciousness, right from the start. I have said of the animate part of the physical world 1 that all organisms are problem solvers. My basic assumption regarding world 2 is that this problem-solving activity of the animate part of world 1 resulted in the emergence of world 2, of the world of consciousness. But I do not mean by this that consciousness solves problems all the time, as I asserted of the organisms. On the contrary. The organisms are preoccupied with problem-solving day in, day out, but consciousness is not only concerned with the solving of problems, although that is its most important biological function. My hypothesis is that the original task of consciousness was to anticipate success and failure in problem-solving and to signal to the organism in the form of pleasure and pain whether it was on the right or wrong path to the solution of the problem.

The criterion of potential satisfactoriness is thus testability, or improbability: only a highly testable or improbable theory is worth testing, and is actually (and not merely potentially) satisfactory if it withstands severe tests—especially those tests to which we could point as crucial for the theory before they were ever undertaken.

Consequently there is little merit in formalizing and elaborating a deductive system (intended for use as an empirical science) beyond the requirements of the task of criticizing and testing it, and of comparing it critically with competitors.

Admittedly, our expectations, and thus our theories, may precede, historically, even our problems. Yet science starts only with problems. Problems crop up especially when we are disappointed in our expectations, or when our theories involve us in difficulties, in contradictions; and these may arise either within a theory, or between two different theories, or as the result of a clash between our theories and our observations.

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