There Can Be No Final Theory of Gravity

All we have are better and better approximations to reality
In almost all cases, you only ever have one theory on offer. In the case of gravity, there literally is only one theory on offer at the moment. There’s general relativity. Previously we did have two theories. We had Newtonian gravity and we had general relativity—but we did a crucial experiment. More

No Truth Can Be Justified

‘Knowledge’ is just our best guess at the time
Initial guesses at what ‘knowledge’ was all about amounted to what is known as the “justified true belief” vision of knowledge, and it’s still the most prevalent idea today. Anyone who calls themself a Bayesian is a justified true believer. This is the misconception that knowledge is about trying to justify your beliefs as true. More

With a Good Theory of Knowledge, You Can Decide What Else Is True

David Deutsch’s theory is centered around good explanations
David Deutsch has this great view of the world where he believes that everything important is understandable by a single human. By important he means the underlying base theories that drive most of reality. Deutsch fixates on four theories. I could argue maybe there are a few more, especially if you start getting into Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations and a few other more sociological ones. More

Rational Optimism Is the Way Out

Pessimism is self-fulfilling
Professions in which you get your feedback from other members of that profession tend to get corrupted. When you see a journalist writing articles to impress other journalists or a restaurant owner trying to impress other foodies and restaurant owners, it’s usually not practical or high-quality. The journalist or restaurant owner may receive accolades within certain elite circles, but that doesn’t reflect reality. More

Pessimism Seems Like an Intellectually Serious Position

We’ve innovated our way out of previous traps
If you’re an academic, being able to explain all of the problems that are out there and how dangerous these problems are and why you need funding to look at them in more depth appears to be the intellectually serious position; whereas, someone who claims that we can solve it sounds a little bit kumbaya. More

It’s Easy to Extrapolate How Things Will Get Worse

It’s harder to guess how life might improve
A lot of the theories as to why we’re imminently going to create an AGI are based in a naïve extrapolation of computational power. It’s almost an induction of more and more computational power. They say, “AI has already gotten good at vision and beating humans at chess and at video games; therefore, it’s going to start thinking soon.” More

We’re All Equal in Our Infinite Ignorance

The door is always open for new ideas
Induction says that prediction is the main reason science exists, but it’s really explanation. You want an explanation of what’s going on, even if you can’t necessarily predict with any certainty what’s going to happen next. In fact, knowing what’s going to happen next with some degree of certainty can be deflating. More

It’s Rare to Have Competing, Viable, Scientific Theories

General relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics is a recent example
There’s also Solomonoff’s theory of induction. I don’t know if you’ve looked at that at all? I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t investigated it. I’m going to mangle the description. It says that if you want to find a new theory that explains why something is happening—in this case something that’s encoded as a binary string—then the correct one is a probability-weighted theory that takes into account all possible theories and weighs them based on their complexity. More

Science Advances One Funeral at a Time

Even the best get stuck
There’s some deep symmetry between multiverse theory and Feynman path integrals, right? You’re absolutely right. Feynman believed in multiple histories, but it’s an open question whether he thought these were actually physically real things or merely mathematical objects. He was relatively silent on the matter. Feynman was a realist and an absolute genius—probably the second greatest physicist of the 20th century after Einstein—but he made one of the worst quips. More