The Theory of Anything

Bruce Caldwell (a scholar interested in Popper and Hayek) wrote a long paper in the Journal of Economic Literature (March 1991) called 'Clarifying Popper'. In this episode, Bruce Nielson summarizes and discusses Caldwell’s paper on how Popper’s ideas could be applied to economics. How well did Bruce Caldwell do in his goal of clarifying Popper's epistemology? Out next episode is anothe...

Though our guest Mark Biros is clearly immersed in critical rationalism and the worldview of Popper and Deutsch, he also has some fairly strong criticisms of some of the ideas popular in what could be called the CritRat community. Here we try to work out our differing ideas on environmentalism, epistemology, quantum mechanics, social media, optimism, monarchies, cults, human extinction, and more.

Historian Matt Bowman discusses his new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America . Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first and most famous persons who claimed to be abducted by aliens. Aside from being a story about UFOs, their life story hinges on a complicated relationship with religion, race, politics, science, and psychology i...

What did David Deutsch get right and wrong in chapter 11, “Time: The First Quantum Concept,” from his first book, Fabric of Reality? Is the flow of time real or an illusion? What does it mean to have free will in a deterministic world? And what are the implications of Bruce’s “Turing world within a Turing world” thought experiment?

What did Karl Popper really mean by refutation? How are empirical theories special? How do objective criticisms differ from subjective criticisms? What is the difference between a theory and an explanation? We consider these questions with a tangent into the theory that animals don’t have feelings.

Brian Boutwell is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi who specializes in “quantitative genetics, with a focus on environmental and psychological risk factors for antisocial and violent behavior.” He has a TED talk, numerous articles in Quillette, and has been published in many journals. Here we discuss his upcoming meta-analysis on twin studies soon to be published in...

Is the government hiding a secret UFO recovery program? What should the critical rationalist attitude be towards these kinds of claims? Why exactly would aliens want to hide from us? We discuss these questions and much more. If you missed it, be sure to check out the congressional hearings on UFOs (UAPs). It was actually quite interesting. Mick West's video criticizing the theory that aliens a...

What did Popper say about corroboration in science? Can a theory NEVER be supported with evidence in any sense at all? Is the Popperian “war on words” justified? Are the positivists, Bayesianists, verificationists, and inductivists really wrong about EVERYTHING?

We interview Bruce’s nephew, Brendon Nielson, who is a well-known electronic music artist under the name Dvddy. We discuss how he uses AI as a tool to create music and how this technology is changing how we work and learn. Could AI liberate us from menial labor and education? Along the way, Cameo makes an AI-generated comic book about David Deutsch.

A deep dive into David Deutsch’s “principle of optimism” featuring Sam Kuypers, Vaden Masrani, Hervé Eulacia, Micah Redding, Bill Rugolsky, and Daniel Buchfink. (Plus, of course, Peter and Bruce). Are all evils due to a lack of knowledge? Are all interesting problems soluble? ALL the problems, really?!?! And what exactly is meant by interesting? Also, should “good guys” ignore the precautionary pr...

Back in 2012, David Deutsch wrote an article called "Creative Blocks: How Close are we to Creating Artificial Intelligence?" This article inspired Bruce to go back to school and study Artificial Intelligence and get a Master's degree in the field. A decade later, a lot has changed in the field of AI, and the field has never seemed so exciting. But are we really any closer to the goal...

Does every one of us live forever in the multiverse? Is death a solvable problem? What is “quantum suicide”? Is quantum torment a concern? Does every fantastical thing we can imagine occur somewhere in the multiverse? What are “Harry Potter universes? Are we Boltzmann brains? Bruce, Cameo, and Peter consider these questions in this week’s episode. Image from jupiterimages on Freeimages.com

Special guest, Lulie Tanett, asked me if she could come on my podcast and interview me about religion. Lulie and Peter ask me numerous religion-related questions such as: How is the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e. Mormon church) similar and different from Deutsch's Four Strands worldview? What might the Deutsch Four Strands worldview learn from religion? In a...

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 Brett Hall's theory.  Along the way, we ask the ultimate question: Why did Karl Popper make his epistemology specifically about refuting empirical scientific theories instead of just generalizing it (li...

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 intellectua...

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?)...

In our previous episode, we asked if Karl Popper was Dogmatic. We also introduced the idea that Karl Popper wasn't convinced that dogmatism was always bad. In this episode, we further explore Karl Popper's idea that dogmatism is sometimes a good thing. We also ask difficult questions like 'How can you tell when you are being dogmatic?' and 'Is it possible to overcome your own dogmatism?'

There seems to be broad agreement, even among Karl Popper's own students, that he was a deeply dogmatic individual. In this episode we ask the question 'Was Karl Popper Dogmatic?' by reviewing a humorous article in Scientific American by John Horgan on August 22, 2018. Along the way, we discuss by what means we judge dogmatism. How do we even tell if someone is dogmatic or not? Is there a litmus t...

Blake Lemoine, the ex-Google engineer, claims LaMDA -- Google's language model -- is sentient. Is he right? Alan Turing is perhaps most famous for his "Turing Test" which is a test of intelligence. David Deutsch has some interesting things to say about the Turing Test in "The Beginning of Infinity." Unfortunately, Deutsch's critique of the Turing Test is often misunderstood and it has led to some...

Is Elon Musk right that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research is like 'summoning the demon' and should be regulated? In episodes 48 and 49, we discussed how our genes 'align' our interests with their own utilizing carrots and sticks (pleasure/pain) or attention and perception. If our genes can create a General Intelligence (i.e. Universal Explainer) alignment and safety 'program' for us,...

How do we square genetically influenced mental disorders with the theory of explanatory universality? In a previous episode, Tracy asked Bruce how to reconcile her experience with mental disorders, like narcissism, with the idea of Universal Explainers. This is part 2 of that discussion. In the last episode, Bruce introduced the idea that emotions and feelings aren't the same as ideas and go back...

How do we square genetically influenced mental disorders with the theory of explanatory universality? In our last episode, Tracy asked Bruce how to reconcile her experience with mental disorders, like narcissism, with the idea of Universal Explainers. In this episode, Bruce does his best to tease out an answer. (While admitting that we can't answer her entirely--yet.)  In "The Beginning of In...

Tracy leads a discussion about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). We discuss various other mental disorders as well. We sadly admit that some disorders are currently so serious that there is little hope of helping those that have them. (And they may not even be aware that they have a disorder!) But will this always be true? If all problems are solubl...

What responsibility do the creators of a TV series or movie have to be faithful to the original source material? What risks are involved with either adapting the material too closely or not close enough? The much-anticipated Wheel of Time tv show is finally here and we discuss our feelings about the show compared to the books. Warning: this podcast contains extensive spoilers for both the books an...

Bruce had a chance to talk to David Deutsch and ask him questions about his views of knowledge to clarify if he disagreed with Popper and Campbell about what is considered knowledge . Bruce took notes and in this episode reports back on what he learned.