多伊奇档案（四）The Deutsch Files IV

Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see The Deutsch Files I, II, and III.

Naval: I can only start with what understanding I want. And I know I’ve asked you this before, but I want to be pedantically exhaustive about connecting the four theories of The Fabric of Reality. And the reason I bring that up is because I think most people still view what you’ve written as being four separate things.

And it’s hard enough to grasp these four separate things because they’re actually fairly deep and wide-ranging theories. But I think, in your mind, they connect together into one thing. Knowledge is a crystal and nature has no boundaries, right? These are just phrases, but these things all connect together.

Connecting the Four Theories into a Unified Whole

So we’ve talked in the past, for example, how epistemology and evolution connected, that they’re both forms of knowledge creation. We’ve talked about how quantum physics and computation connect to create quantum computation. I’d just love to get as many examples. How does physics connect to evolution? How does evolution connect to computation?

For example, things that may be less obvious where people might view things as different theories, but to you, they’re fundamentally the same.

David: Yeah. Evolution and epistemology, people find both of those, the connection between both of those and physics, very counterintuitive because most people think of physics in a very bottom-up way.

And I think, for completely independent reasons, such as Constructor Theory, that’s a mistake. Ever since that idea caught on, like sometime after Newton, physicists have tried to shoehorn other physical theories into that mold, and that gives rise to, for example, the problem of the foundations of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

How can you have an exact second law when the fundamental theories of physics are all time-reversible and the second law is time-irreversible? How can you have that? The prevailing view is thermodynamics and epistemology are both emergent theories. And, therefore, not fundamental from the physics point of view.

And therefore, if we want to understand the universe at a fundamental level, we needn’t bother with those. Those are just like the theory of washing machines or gardening. I think that’s artificial. And especially when they have to get very embarrassed when they exclude thermodynamics from physics in that way.

I think a theory which is going to go deeper than the current paradigm of physics is going to have to put emergent phenomena and emergent theories on the same level as microscopic theories. People talk about reductionism and holism and some people are reductionists and some people are holists. I think I want to put them both in a sack and tie it up and let them come out with a resolution.

There cannot be a criterion for excluding a set of theories from the body of knowledge other than whether they’re good explanations. Yes, abandon them if they’re not good explanations. But if they are, why make a class distinction between them? It’s just going to lead to error. And I think it has led to errors in thinking about the world. So that’s the connection between physics and those two. 

Emergence Is Fundamental

Naval: What you just said, for example, is that reductionist theories aren’t the only theories there are because they don’t form good explanations at the level where you need them. 

David: Yes.

Naval: Because especially when you have emergence, then you have very unpredictable things. You’re not going to calculate all the particle collisions from the Big Bang till now to figure out how humans evolve. Or how species evolve.

At every level of emergence, there is a possibility for an explanation that explains that level. And you need that explanation. 

David: Yes, exactly. 

Naval: So, I think that’s very helpful. And in your thermodynamics example, if you’re trying to figure out how a steam engine works, you’re not going to do statistical mechanics and trace every collision. You’re going to actually probably start at thermodynamics. Yes. And so, that’s a tie between, I guess, is it evolution and physics? No, it’s epistemology and physics.

David: So, thermodynamics is emergent physics. And in terms of those four, it is epistemology. But that just shows that terminology is misleading. 

Brett: The terminology in particular of the word “fundamental”, which I think you use slightly differently to the majority of others, especially physicists, they hear, and anyone listening to this, hears fundamental and thinks reductionism automatically.

For example, you would say that people are a fundamental feature of reality. So, what does fundamental therefore mean?

David: So, fundamental ideas are the ones that are needed in more types of explanations. We’ll never get to the ultimate fundamental theory, because that would mean that there were no more problems. That can’t happen. But yes, so that’s how I use the word fundamental. 

Naval: I think you also said something related, which is that if reality is what is needed in your explanation or what has to exist in the explanation for the explanation to make sense. 

David: It’s a rule for deciding that something is real. 

Naval: Yeah. 

David: It’s not the meaning of real, because there are things we don’t understand about “real”. Like, in what sense are numbers real and abstract objects real? And in case physicists don’t like that, I always ask: In what sense are laws of physics real? Because we can’t trip over one, but on the other hand, we can’t understand anything in physics without them. So, they’re real. 

Brett: Some would claim we are cognitively incapable of understanding physics full stop up to a certain point. This is the idea that Richard Dawkins has of “Middle World” which was cropping up very recently in discussions. Our brain evolved on the African savannah in order to survive. So, it should be no mystery to us, no agreement about what quantum theory means, because in fact we are cognitively closed to understanding things that are too small, things that are outside middle world because they travel too fast or are too large like the entire cosmos.

But this is flawed because of universality? 

David: Among other things. 

Naval: We understand quasars and subatomic particles. 

David: If that argument had been valid, then we would have stopped a long time ago in understanding things, especially like mathematics, but also physics. 

Brett: And that then brings up this connection or draws out this connection between quantum physics and epistemology. Can you draw that line, that connection?

David: So, the nicest one, I think this is the one that Naval also likes best. The idea of a crystal in the multiverse. If knowledge is a kind of information, which once it’s there, keeps itself in existence and gets that property by error correction. Then, since there are many errors for every possible truth, many possible errors for every truth, then in the multiverse, if there’s error correction, then there are a bunch of unlike universes, which become alike in the region in which they’re correcting errors.

And, so, that’s a striking connection between epistemology and physics. I hope that this kind of connection will be amplified once we get to formulating theories of knowledge and so on in constructor theory. Constructor theory isn’t limited to the parochial properties of quantum theory. It emerged from quantum theory, but it emerged from problems in quantum theory. But it’s a level of description, and I’m gesticulating as if it was a higher level, but actually it’s a lower level of description than quantum theory.

It’s more reductionist than quantum theory, and yet it is more compatible with emergent properties. We’re hoping eventually that things like knowledge and economics, ultimately consciousness maybe, though my own view is that consciousness will require an extra idea, not just elaborating ideas from within constructor theory. It requires an idea, another idea, at least one. 

Constructor Theory Could Transform Multiple Fields

Brett: Hitherto, the line from Newton through to Einstein and then to quantum theory has been ever more difficult and elaborate mathematics. And, so, then string theory comes along, and this I think leads to the general opinion that the next theory of physics will be more mathematically challenging, and hence all the reasons earlier that maybe we won’t be able to understand it.

But constructor theory seems to have echoes of that famous Feynman line where he said that perhaps the ultimate laws of physics, or whatever he meant by that, would be more like the rules of the checkerboard than some fancy dynamical mathematical laws.

Is that what you have in mind with constructor theory? Some checkerboard type notion of possible and impossible moves. 

David: Yeah, it could be just like that. If you have a listing of all the moves in a game of chess, you can’t understand what’s happening there unless you know the rules of chess. But knowing the rules of chess, the people who make chess programs think that if you know the rules of chess, you can understand all the games, but they’re not true.

If you want to understand the games as opposed to just win them, then you need a lot more than just the rules. And yeah, Constructor Theory is just like that. We hope.

Brett: But it’s more than just physics, as you say. This is an explanation that’s not merely about fundamental laws of physics, but is it extendable into biology and epistemology?

David: Yeah. Or you could say that physics is going to consume all those fields, just like it has consumed many other fields. We think of Constructor Theory as a theory of physics. And if it consumes those fields, that’s what physics has always done. 

Naval: Okay. Can I back up for a second on Constructor Theory? Because I think it’s the part that might be understood the least by the general audience.

I know that Chiara wrote a book on it. You have not yet written extensively for the lay people on it. What problem are you trying to solve? And where are you at so far? And what level of confidence do you have that this is the right thing to do, approach to go down? 

David: Oh, those are very long, long questions.

Naval: It’s okay. I think the answer is illuminating. 

David: So, when I wrote my first paper on Constructor Theory, which was a philosophical paper, it didn’t really have any physics. It was published in Philosophical Journal and I wanted to explain what we were trying to do, what this research program is, because we didn’t know at the time, and we still don’t.

What the definitive rules of constructor theory are going to be, we’re going to find those as we find the applications. So, I thought I would give some motivation. We don’t have a good theory of initial conditions. Think carefully, why should we need initial conditions when we are perfectly fine to have no theory of the final conditions?

So that’s one thing. And then the thermodynamics thing. And then there’s the fact that things like computation and information can’t be expressed in the initial conditions plus laws of motion way. And I thought I would write a quick paper and I ended up with 18 motivations. And you can look up the paper if you want to see all 18. 

I can’t think of them all now, but this seemed to me a motivation for thinking that this constructor theoretic approach was a very simple change in worldview in a certain way. You can say very quickly what the change is, but the ramifications are huge. And it seems to touch all these problems in different fields.

And that’s what motivated me to try to make a theory out of this. And the next thing that happened was that I gave a talk at the Clarendon Laboratory and Chiara was in the audience. She was a graduate student working on quantum information. And she came up to me afterwards and said, uh – what about – so that can’t be right. Can it? Because…

I had indeed contradicted myself in the talk. And so, then she came round and, and we chatted about it, and I said, do you want to work on it? Because there’s a lot more to work on than one person can do, especially me. So, she said, yes. And since then, she’s worked on the Constructor Theory of Life, Constructor Theory of Probability, which in a way, translating existing theories into constructor theoretic form.

And uncovering little nuggets. My favourite nugget is that in constructor theoretic thermodynamics, the first law is to do with information, not just the second law. So the way she defines the first law is similar to statistical mechanics, but you end up with the first law that’s about, you can do this and not that, you can do this and not that, and as a result, you get the version of the first law, but better than normal because it incidentally has the property that, let me see if I get this right, I think it incidentally has the property that there must be a lower bound on the energy, whereas existing thermodynamics doesn’t. You have to put that in as an extra axiom. And if there were no lower bound, then you could have an object that you were just extracting energy out of without violating second law, just first law, extracting energy forever.

And that would make a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. In the existing thermodynamics, you have to impose that as an extra condition and construct theory, you don’t have to. Meanwhile, I’ve been, no, we, we have together been working on the Constructor Theory of Time. Yeah, perhaps I should say something about the Constructor Theory of Time.

Really the first people to have this idea were Wheeler and DeWitt, who were trying to find a viable theory of quantum gravity. And they found a theory of quantum gravity in which there’s no time. Time doesn’t appear in the theory. There’s just different spaces, three dimensional spaces, which all have amplitudes, quantum mechanical amplitudes, and they all exist simultaneously. And time is an emergent property the way they are entangled with each other, but nothing ever changes. It’s just an emergent property of how they’re entangled. And then, Julian Barbour made a big thing out of it, wrote a whole book about it, then Page, so that was a theory tied to general relativity.

It would only work in the context of general relativity. Page and Wootters made a construction that will work in any quantum theory, not just quantum theory of gravity, but any quantum theory, you can formulate a theory of time that doesn’t have things changing in it. And, so, the static universe still has time because of entanglement.

So that is more general. It doesn’t require Wheeler and DeWitt’s specific theory of space time and when I saw Page and Wootters’ theory, I immediately thought, yeah, this is it. This is what time is. And then many people have tried to get something more out of it and they failed. And then Sam came along and got something more out of it. So, he’s got the most advanced theory of time in history. In the universe, in the multiverse or whatever, so far. In a way, it’s only a small improvement on Page and Wootters’, but it is more general and that’s what we want. And then Chiara and I are working on the Constructor Theory of Time, which we hope will be this kind of, for the moment, the ultimate version of that, which instead of deriving the concepts from some theory, like quantum theory, it lays down rules that it says.

Any theory that obeys these rules will have time and Chiara already did that with probability. So, any theory that obeys these rules will have probability, even though there’s no stochastic processes. So, it has probability in the sense that quantum theory does, that an observer, a rational observer will bet in certain ways, but nothing can happen in, in everything’s deterministic.

Constructor theory, by the way, is necessarily deterministic. It can’t work unless everything is deterministic. 

Naval: But your view of the quantum multiverse is already deterministic. 

David: Yes. So, the quantum multiverse obeys that rule. And I’ve also written that the prevailing concept of a stochastic theory that just doesn’t make sense.

Saying that something’s more probable is like saying it has more magic. Nothing follows from that statement. You need an extra theory to make sense of that statement. And now I’m working on the universal constructor. 

Naval: Is universal constructor related a little bit to your talk in The Fabric of Reality about virtual reality generators?

David: Only, so that’s an interesting thought. I don’t think it’s related to, except in the general way that the fact that there is such a thing as virtual reality. That you can make a virtual reality machine in our universe and that it can simulate anything then that’s Turing universality or computational universality.

In constructor theory, you hardly have to say that. It’s so built in that it is the most natural thing. You’d have to work very hard and get over some very difficult obstacles if that weren’t true in constructor theory. 

Naval: So far in constructor theory, you’ve basically got some better or more universal explanations of existing theories.

David: Yes.  

Naval: When do we start getting predictions? When do we start getting tests? 

David: So, I guess having a lower bound for the energy is a prediction, not a very strong prediction, because everyone believed that already, I think that’s where constructor theory will start making new, where people will start formulating theories about new things within the constructor theory framework, that will be when these new things combine existing theories where it was unexpected before. Now, I don’t believe in the Quantum Theory of Life, for example. I think that’s a dead end and blind alley. But that sort of thing is the sort of thing that Constructor Theory could provide a framework for that existing theories don’t have a framework for.

It’s a pity. It’s like, I thought in The Fabric of Reality, I thought that the multiverse kind of solved the problem of free will. I didn’t quite say that there, but I hinted that maybe it solves the problem of free will and I don’t think it does at all, but even though it doesn’t solve it, it gives a framework in which one can think free, because free will involves counterfactuals have much more meaning in theory of the multiverse than they do in a Newtonian or classical theory and in constructor theory, they have even more meaning.

That’s the kind of thing I can’t foretell the growth of knowledge. I don’t even know that constructor theory is going to work. It could end up as a kind of curiosity, that this is what people in the early 21st century, some people thought would illuminate things, but it only provides a little bit of illumination.

And now we know what the real illumination is. We don’t need it. That might be, or it might be the opposite. 

Brett: This is a meta question. I don’t want to take us off on a tangent, but you just said there, as a good Popperian would, that Constructor Theory could be completely wrong and it will just be a footnote in the history of physics.

There are other people out there with new theories as well. They do not speak in a Popperian way, and they will say about their new theory that they’re holding up, that this is going to solve the origins of life, this is going to tell us what the nature of time is, this is going to solve what the preconditions of the Big Bang were, and so on, with great confidence.

And they, I have to say, get a lot more attention and they get the investment and they appear on some big podcasts and things. Is this an inherent disadvantage of being a Popperian that we couch our terms in such conjectural language? 

David: I suppose if you were fanatical about getting approval and funding, then you would maximize that.

But I think people working on things, usually the people working on deep things, for their own sake, for the sake of those things, are the ones that tend to make progress. In some cases, that will make them famous, like if you invent mRNA vaccine, then it’ll make you famous, though those people weren’t famous before.

And I think, I’m always suspicious when someone says what they’re going to invent, or what they’re going to prove, or what they’re going to find. I would rather they said: This is a problem I’m going to address. I don’t know where it’s going. Here’s my problem. We find it interesting. We think it might do so and so, but maybe it won’t.

Maybe it’ll do something we haven’t thought of. I think that’s, I find that more attractive as a stance. Like when I’m thinking of someone else’s you know, elevator pitch, I think Popper used to say: what is your problem? What are you working on? And that in research, when you meet someone who is not in your field, the first thing you say is: what are you working on?

You know, that’s not, what are you going to find? That would be a weird question. 

Innovation Often Emerges Unexpectedly

Naval: This is a little historical, and I know you don’t necessarily like to go into your own thought process because we’re not here to copy you, but I think it is illuminating to think abou the connection you made between physics and computation.   

You basically have created the, or helped create the quantum theory of computation. And there are a lot of researchers and technologists now working on quantum computers, tons of them. In fact, we just talked to Maria, she’s off to work at some quantum computing company. And not all of these people believe in the quantum theory of the multiverse.

Did you start with Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds’ theory, and then get to quantum computation? Or was that? And do you view that as fundamental? Like, how, can you explain quantum computation with the observer collapse theory or is that just contradictory? 

David: As you may know, when I first came up with the idea of a quantum computer, I didn’t even think of it as a quantum computer.

I didn’t call it that. What I was trying to do is, so, the consensus at the time among people who work on Everett’s multiverse theory was that the multiverse theory gives the same experimental predictions as collapse theory. And, in a way, that was already known to be false. There’s the paradox of Wigner’s Friend, and, you know how people just take paradoxes?

Yeah, that’s a paradox. They don’t think that’s a reason why we’re wrong. It’s fundamentally wrong in our worldview. So I thought that Everett’s theory must be testable. And, it was testable, because it proposed the different dynamics from the wave function collapse, all the wave function collapse theories.

So, I thought, okay, how would we test it? And, I thought, simplest thing, you do a version of the two-slit experiment. Then you have to have a measurement of that measurement. And how do you do that? And I thought, oh, it could be done with a computer. So, there’s this computer that, but it’s a computer that’s going to have quantum, the two-slit experiment or whatever you call it, the Stern-Gerlach experiment or whatever, they’re all equivalent really, if it’s going to have that in it, then the computer can’t be decoherent, so it can’t be a classical computer.

So, it must be augmented with these quantum operations. Which operations would you need? So, I added some operations to make a coherent classical computer with these extra operations. And that’s what it was in my mind. It was just an object. It was an object connected to a computer with certain, that what I was interested in is something else.

It was this experiment that you could do. So, then I wrote a paper about that experiment, which among other things, there was only one section of the paper that had that in it. And then that paper was rejected and the story that they said: that’s philosophy. And I was like, okay, I don’t care. So, I put it aside and I didn’t get it out again.

I would tell people about it, like when I was talking to other physicists, I told Roger Penrose and I said, okay, now you’ve got to accept that if quantum theory is true, universally true, then Everett is right. And he said, yeah, but quantum theory isn’t true. Okay. That’s a consistent position, but that’s not the position that the vast majority of physicists took.

So then, at the same conference where I asked Roger Penrose that, I was also talking to someone who worked for a publisher and he said, why didn’t you submit it? And I was like, oh, it’s too much trouble. And eventually I submitted it, and it was eventually published at the same time as my universal quantum computers paper, even though it came much earlier.

And people think that I thought it was in the opposite order, but I didn’t. I first thought of the experiment to test Everett. And then much later, thought about quantum computers. 

Naval: Is this the same experiment that’s mentioned in The Beginning of Infinity as going inside the mind of the AI? Yes. I see. So, you came up with that first.

So, you had to create an experiment to test Many Worlds and said, okay, is the observer making a difference? Yes. Let’s get inside the observer. Yes. But if we get inside the observer, it’s just a double slit experiment all over again, unless there’s a different kind of computer than the classical computer, it’s not going to be affected by the same interference effects that the double slit experiment is vulnerable to. So, we need to create qubits or quantum computing or wht.

David: Again, yeah. The term qubit wasn’t invented till much, much later. And, and I did, as I said, I didn’t think of it like that. 

Naval: So, you were solving a different problem.

David: Yeah, a different problem. And it, it didn’t cross my mind that this was a new mode of computation. 

Brett: And to do this test we’ll need AGI as well. 

David: Yeah. That’s not my fault. 

Brett: Exactly. 

David: It’s the opposition that wants the conscious observer to be, to do something different. Okay. And in that case, you put a conscious observer.

Naval: It needs, it needs AGI and it needs quantum computing. It needs both. 

David: Yes. 

Naval: The AGI has to be a quantum computer internally. 

David: It has to be running on a quantum computer. 

Brett: Because the alternative perspective is. 

Naval: Otherwise, you have interference. 

Brett: Well, yeah, it’s the opposition that is saying that it is the observer collapsing the wave function.

And, so, if that’s their position, then we have to have an observer that can observe things without collapsing wave functions. 

David: Yeah. But this observer doesn’t do much that’s quantum. He only, he only does a few quantum operations, like half a dozen quantum operations, but most of the time he’s thinking about things like, do I know this and so on.

And that’s all done with classical operations, but done with coherent quantum objects. So, they have to be done with qubits instead of bits. So, in relation to what we were saying before, I would never have said at the time: I’m going to invent quantum computers. It didn’t occur to me.

Even when I finally did, it was, I wasn’t even trying to do that. I was like, I had this conversation with Charlie Bennett, where he said, “complexity”. I said, complexity is arbitrary because it depends on the hardware. And he said, but the hardware is physics. So, then I said, okay, if the hardware is physics, then you’re using the wrong physics.

So, I thought I would go home and recast Turing’s analysis in quantum physics instead of with paper tape, like he did. And then I saw that there were  algorithms that didn’t have classical analogue.

Knowledge Evolves Independently Across Universes

Naval: We talked earlier about how knowledge is that which replicates itself in the environment or tends to get replicated in the environment, not necessarily replicates itself, although it does in evolution.

But it tends to get replicated in the environment. So, if you were able to peek across the multiverse, you would see that error correction leads to the same or similar knowledge across the multiverse. Is that true within a given universe as well? Because the universe is fairly large. There should be error correction processes.

Maybe they’re going on elsewhere. 

David: We know that there’s such a thing as convergent evolution, that things look like tigers, but they, they evolved in Australia or whatever. And, and we know that there’s a convergent evolution of ideas because, uh, people can have an idea and person who they’ve never heard of has the same idea and that can happen as well.

It’s not as systematic as it is in the multiverse because in the multiverse. You get all variants of the same kind of size or involving the same number of mutations. They all happen and they’re all error corrected. So convergent evolution is a much stronger effect in the multiverse. 

Naval: I see. But within a given universe, does that increase, it’s not probability, but does it increase the idea that there’s more life out there?

Life itself being a convergent property of certain initial conditions. In the 

David: In the universe?

Naval: In the universe. 

David: Yeah, maybe. But we don’t know. We could be a fluke or this could be a universe where there are very few people initially. There might be a lot more later. 

Naval: There’s a lot of Kepler planets out there. What’s your intuition? 

David: I don’t know. 

Anti-Rational Memes Hinder Human Progress

Naval: Let’s talk a little bit about anti-rational memes. I think this is one of the least understood parts of what you’ve written about. And it’s mentioned briefly in The Beginning of Infinity. And it’s basically, I think this is the part where I understand the least. Cause I will admit I did not resonate with that chapter as well.

But I think your thesis is that a lot of human progress was held back. Because the creativity went into figuring out how to keep people where they, on the ideas that certain people already said, these are the correct ideas and we’re going to stay here. And then all creativity got poured into reinforcing those ideas as opposed to letting you wander outside of those boundaries.

David: Yes. 

Naval: So, what are these anti-rational memes? Are they still around? Or is it always a war between them and the rational memes and, you know?

David: So, first of all, that this happened, it seems to me unanswerable. There’s no other way of explaining why it took 300,000 years at least to get from stone tools to the very first real progress. It depends where, where you count it from starting, but certainly far less. It’s, it’s very recent compared with 300,000 years. I think we should, secondly, I think we shouldn’t be surprised that anti-rational memes exist because evolution, it’s most evolutionarily stabilized thing in a biological organism.

It’s the genetic code, like the biology doesn’t care about, about your arm being chopped off except insofar as that affects the propagation of your DNA and the DNA, all evolution of stuff inside the cell that, affects whether mutations are going to happen in the DNA, they’re all towards greater fidelity.

There are no mutations that reduce the fidelity. Some people, I used to think, and Dawkins has contradicted those people very cogently, that maybe there’s an optimum amount of mutation. Because if you have too much, then too many of you die too soon. And if you have too little, then you don’t evolve fast enough to cope with changing circumstances.

So, there’s an optimal amount and maybe the error correcting mechanisms are not optimized for error correction, they’re optimized for that. That’s not true. The real truth is that species go extinct all the time for this very reason: that they have too strong error correction. Not enough evolution happens to cope with the fact that, that circumstances change. So, the vast majority of species that have ever existed went extinct and they went extinct because they did not evolve to meet the new conditions. And I think that’s what we should expect from memes. It’s a bit of a miracle. That’s not like necessarily true of memes, and I could talk a bit about why it’s not necessarily true.

But the thing we should expect when we first encounter, the thing I expected when I first realized that there were going to be anti-rational memes is that they were going to get more and more anti-rational. There’s nothing to stop them. There’s the fact that they’re going to eventually kill the subculture that has them.

It doesn’t stop them any more than the peacock’s tail, sooner or later will result in the extinction of the peacock species. Even though the male peacocks are still trying to get larger tails and the female peacocks are still selecting the larger tails and all that’s happening. And sooner or later, the species will go extinct as almost all species have. 

So, therefore, I also realized that the actual faculty of creativity couldn’t have evolved in order to be creative. It must have evolved for some other reason. And then Popper comes in to save us when he points out that there’s no such thing as instruction from without. There is, in the case of DNA, in the case of DNA we can just copy, like when the cell divides, it can just copy the existing DNA.

There’s no way of copying an existing culture into the next generation. The next generation has to guess and most of the information that it builds up when it is trying to copy has been generated inside itself and is going to be different in lots of ways. So, you don’t need a strong mutation mechanism.

Even so, it took a long time and I don’t think we know the history, Matt Ridley says you need a certain population size before progress can take hold. I’m not sure that’s true. My counterexample is the earliest open societies, the earliest rational societies, like as far as we know, there may have been some before, but the earliest ones we know of, Athens, were very small by our standards and they were even very small by the world’s standards.

Athens was a tiny proportion of the world’s population. And yet, it had this huge burst of creativity, which if it had gone on for 300 years, like ours has, they might well have reached what we have reached, but it was destroyed for various reasons that historians try to understand, and so on.

Our enlightenment having lasted, depends what you count, lasted maybe 500 years, maybe 300 years. It’s far longer than any previous Enlightenment has lasted. They, all the ones that I’ve heard, and mainly the two I discuss in my book, lasted a generation or two, and then they ended. And I think they ended because they couldn’t solve the problem that arose.

They hadn’t, they had what it took. It was just too soon, and they were killed by the bad guys. Winning by, by irrelevant things like force of numbers.

The West Versus the Rest

Naval: What do you think are the dominant anti rational memes in this version of the Enlightenment that could prevent, that could take us back to the Dark Ages? What do we need to stay in the Enlightenment? 

David: Yeah, I can’t think of a plausible way we could go back to the Dark Ages. I’m sure it’s possible for fundamental reasons. But I can’t really imagine it happening and if I were to imagine it, it would be prophecy. And I can’t really imagine it.

I think when you say anti-rational memes today, we’ve got to make a distinction between the West and everyone else. So, everyone else has still got, other cultures in the world are still dominated by anti-rational memes that embody their culture. That’s the thing that’s mostly the, the, the, the anti-rational memes are mostly devoted to protecting their existence and only secondarily other things. In the West, I think, again, I don’t know, but it seems to me that the subculture or the set of ideas in the West that is most anti rational are the ones to do with education. Why education? Maybe again, maybe we should expect that because, like I said about biology, what are the most stable constructs in DNA, they are the code for ribosomes. The ribosomes are the educational institutions of cells. They are, their job is to pass on all the knowledge from one generation to the next, and they have to do that as faithfully as evolution can make it. And any evolution that occurs is in the direction of making them more faithful.

They’re still not perfectly faithful, but that’s not evolution’s fault, that’s physics’ fault. We’ve got too many cosmic rays coming down and too much ultraviolet light and so on. And it is thought, although again, I saw a YouTube video saying that maybe this isn’t at all true, but biologists think that the ribosome stopped evolving 2 billion years ago, everything else has carried on evolving and the ribosome hasn’t, the DNA code has remained the same, even though you could, and they have, invented a different DNA code and implemented an artificial ribosome. And it doesn’t exist in nature. In a culture, traditionally, the thing that is responsible for maintaining the culture over generations, fighting the fact that people die and cultures want to stay the same, want to preserve their knowledge, are educational institutions. And of course, from that point of view, they have to be anti-rational, just like evolution is. So then, the mystery is not why they’re anti-rational, it’s why everything else has become more and more rational in the West.

And that is, I don’t know, again, this is a matter for historians. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was going to write a book about the Enlightenment and it hasn’t materialized it like I first heard her talking about this many years ago, and I don’t know why she hasn’t written it. She’s the perfect person to write it.

Brett: In a sense the explanation for why almost all species have ever gone extinct is because evolution has not occurred fast enough, if only it could occur faster. And, when it comes to civilizations, the overwhelming majority of civilizations have gone extinct because the mimetic evolution hasn’t happened fast enough.

David: Exactly.

Brett: We are tending in the direction of a more dynamic society, but there are anti-rational memes here that still challenge us. And you just mentioned educational institutions as a source for propagating these kinds of things, but also parenting is another one.

David: Primarily, it’s, the educational institutions themselves which, if you think of institutions as a thing in people’s minds, their ideas, then they themselves are, the most anti-rational memes in the West.

But they also, as you say, quite rightly, they also serve as means of propagating other anti-rational memes. And some people think that they’ve been taken over by a mind virus. And now they are even more anti rational than they evolved to be. 

Naval: I think to a point you made at The Beginning of Infinity, these institutions are loadbearing. They carry a lot of knowledge, but because they have heads and tails that can be taken over and a sufficiently compelling idea can come along, take over the whole thing and then it’s masquerading as the former institution, relying on the brand and the signalling value of the previous institution, but it’s doing completely different things.

David: Scary, but plausible.

Naval: Yeah, there’s a very cynical phrase that goes around the internet, it’s someone’s law or something, which is like, any institution’s behavior is best explained as if it’s run by a cabal of its enemies. 

David: Ah, you’ve got to be careful. I always apply the criterion of, if that’s true, how do you explain the progress we’ve had?

Naval: Right. 

David: There can’t be a law to that effect. There can’t be a Moloch or that thing.  

Naval: But maybe it’s as simple as individuals or small groups of individuals coming up with creative solutions. For whatever reason, there was a space and time where they could, they had enough time to experiment with those solutions to see what was real.  You can come up with the theory of thermodynamics, then you have a steam engine. The steam engine is actually turning wheels and pulling things. It works. And then you carve out a space in technology and science where these things are accepted and then it expands out from there. And now we may be undergoing the opposite collapse where technology and science are affecting so much life so quickly that people feel destabilized and left behind.

So they rebel and they say, we have to regulate this and control that. And eventually now with AI regulations, we’re talking about limiting the free exercise of mathematics. You can’t have that many flops. You can’t run that operation. You can’t do that calculation even. So, it might be just the genes that, or the means that resist the change. They’re being forced to change too fast. And so now they get the numbers on their side. This is a theory.

David: Yeah. I can’t possibly accept the pessimistic version of that, but something like that is obviously true, but it’s a problem. It’s a problem that is soluble. And it’s up to us to make the arguments.

Naval: What’s underpinning the whole thing? What is underpinning any solution? Is it optimism? Is it error correction? Is it freedom of speech? Is it small groups? Is it, what is it? What’s the counter? What’s the antidotes? 

David: I could say freedom of speech is the thing that needs to be protected at all costs, but I don’t think it’s true that freedom of speech is being that much impaired at the moment. 

Certain things you’re not allowed to say. So, it’s more that, and certain things you must say, which is perhaps even worse, but they are, I would call those fads, shibboleths rather than actual reduction in the freedom of speech in, I don’t know if you like this analogy, but in medieval times, there were guilds and if you wanted to make anything to join a guild, and therefore there was only one way of making a thing, and there was no scope for inventing a different way of making the thing, because you’d have to join a guild and they wouldn’t let you. Now, that is the kind of thing we do not have at the moment in regard to freedom of speech.

It’s not that anybody that wants to say anything has to get permission. It’s that anyone who says things in public has to obey certain constraints, but they are, I think the language is still universal, even if you obey those constraints. If the things you had to say became a substantial proportion of everything that everyone says.

Then if you had to say Comrade Stalin at the beginning of every maths paper, even then it didn’t completely stop Soviet mathematicians from pursuing maths. And we’re nowhere near that. We’re nowhere near having to make a woke declaration at the beginning of every paper. 

Naval: Do you have your pronouns in your bio?

David: That would be, so that’s the thing that isn’t happening yet. That would be the beginning of the law.

Naval: I think culturally, though, the slippery slope is a real thing, because it’s the nature of politics. You get a little bit, it’s a tug of war, you tug more. 

David: If it were a real thing, then we wouldn’t have ever had any progress because in the past the anti-rational memes were worse, much worse. And yet the enlightenment happened. The enlightenment was created. By people who were thoroughly constrained by anti-rational memes. They had to, everything they said had to be praising God or praising the King or, and they weren’t allowed to, women weren’t allowed, a whole bunch of things weren’t allowed and a whole bunch of other things were compulsory, but nevertheless, a small number of people, the elites among the elites, the Medici. The Medici were so powerful that they could violate some of the restrictions and it grew from there.

Naval: Elon Musk today. 

David: Yeah. And you.

Error-correcting Institutions

Brett: So, you’d say it’s perhaps exaggerated or you’ve often referred to the age of hyperbole in terms of the fact that there may have been in the past a perceived golden age of things like capitalism, for example, and now that’s under attack, or in the past a perceived optimism during the space age, which maybe has been in decline.

But you think that’s hyperbolic? 

David: I think something really bad is happening, there’s no doubt about that. But I don’t think it is a reversion to the old things. Some of the ideologies are the same as old ideologies, but the mechanisms that, again, I don’t know if this is, if you’ll see the relevance of this but the mechanisms that get people cancelled for saying anti woke things are not the same as the ones that used to get them cancelled. And even when those things were in force, Darwin was utterly devastated by the death of his daughter and that was, that was a normal thing at the time. Everyone else thought it was normal. Everyone else thought he was exaggerating when he was taking it too hard. And he never went to church from then on. And his family would go to church and he would wait outside. He didn’t get any personal backlash for that because a gentleman who was an academic could do what he thought right.

And there was nobody to, there was no mechanism to, to force him to do what everyone else was doing. And I think the thing that is causing trouble now. It’s not, it’s not that we’re losing freedom of speech. That’s what I’m trying to say. We’re, I’m not sure how to describe what’s happening. It’s, the mechanism is new. Some of the ideas are old, but they’ve always been around. 

People are talking about how England is going down the drain, but England in 1945 basically voted in communism and the Attlee government nationalized everything. Controlled everything. It had absolutely no chance of sinking the project of Britain. And, in fact, as I keep reminding people, it was Attlee who persuaded the Americans to join NATO. So, these were functionally communists. They were violently anti-Soviet. In other words, they were violently pro-British. They believed in the British institutions. They just had various wrong ideas about the economy, so they wanted to implement, which is a very British thing to do.

Like I often say, the systems that are good at error correction make larger errors, and those errors, some of them anyway, the major ones, were corrected. 

Naval: As long as you don’t change the system itself to stop error correction. So, there are people who try to hack the system itself and I think that is a problem with giving complete power to one side for any number of years, if they start being systemic changes so that they will not leave power.

David: Yeah. So, we have to use the secondary methods of error correction to stop them making systemic changes. The last few governments, both Labor and conservative, have made changes to the British constitution, which I think are very perverse and going the wrong way. But there’s also the fact that the real British constitution is in people’s minds and the governments can’t change those.

Naval: They try to control the media. 

David: Yeah. 

Naval: And it’s interesting because now people talk about how the media is controlled, but I think the media has always been controlled. It’s just now we have alternative media so we can see that more clearly. So, more is being revealed than being changed. 

You mentioned that the most anti-rational memes exist in the system of education that we have. It’s a modern system, right? Before the Prussians and Napoleon, you didn’t have mandatory public education, for example. In your mind, what is the right way to educate people.

The Bucket Theory of the Mind

David: So, first of all, I mean, the superficial meaning of institution.

Naval:  Yeah.

David: Universal schools and that kind of thing are a relatively recent thing, but the Bucket Theory of the Mind has existed since prehistory and it started improving.

So, Popper came along and contradicted it. No-one has noticed, but he came along and contradicted it in the mid 20th century. But, education had been improving before that, for a hundred years before that because these anti rational memes conflict with the general culture, which had been improving by leaps and bounds through the 19th century and the scientific revolution and so on.

The actual practices of making children sit in rows and recite things by heart and hit them when they don’t, that has changed. But the underlying theory of what, for what it’s all supposed to do, is exactly the same as it was in prehistoric times. The idea is that we want to make sure that the next generation get the knowledge that we have in our culture, faithfully, because that’s what knowledge is. It’s information that is poured into you and anything that’s not faithful is going to be an error because almost all deviations from the true theory are going to be false. And so that just doesn’t take into account that this process of transfer is not a process of copying or pouring. It’s a process that happens inside the recipient and is about the recipient trying to pick and choose between the stuff he sees and trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of what it’s for and including moral theories and everything, not just factual theories.

So, once you realize that it’s that way around and it’s got to be that way around, then you can begin to see that existing educational practices, from the point of view of the Bucket Theory of the Mind, are the same as they’ve always been. And it needs to be changed. I t just occurs to me now that the ways it’s changed are not really educational.

They have been, because the general culture has got less punitive and been about welfare rather than duty and that kind of thing, it, people have got the idea that you’ve got to pour it all in faithfully, but you’ve got to be nice about it. You can’t be mean, but the whole thing is measured at the end of the day by the exam, which tells you what percentage of the stuff that was poured in, you actually allowed in.

Naval: Okay. So the conditions at the prison might’ve improved. 

David: Yeah. Greatly. 

Naval: Okay. But as a parent, we’re all terrified by the idea that our kids might grow up not speaking the language, not knowing the mathematics. And just playing with spiders in the corner and be unfit for anything other than agricultural work.

So, what do we do?  

David: It’s funny you should mention language, but, uh, speaking one’s native language and walking are two things that are not taught in our culture and never have been, I think. And nobody, there’s some quote from an educational series that says that if children were taught to walk in school, then they’d be 10 years old and still not able to walk.

Half of them would be. And the other half wouldn’t have learned it in class and that, that’s true of everything. So one problem is that this idea of not having an agenda for how they should be, how they should turn out is very counterintuitive because the prevailing theory is not just, it’s not just wrong philosophy or the bucket theory of the mind.

It also goes against cultural practices. But you, if a child doesn’t go to school and meets other children and they’re going to say, oh, you don’t go to school, that’s nice, but what’s seven and five? And then your child is going to say, I don’t know. And I don’t care. And you are going to be embarrassed and you are going to find it difficult not to be and not to pass that on to your children.

By the way, the vast majority of those improvements, not just in school, but in parenting as well, were done by left wing people, which is ironic because their theory of what should be done in the wider culture was always harmful. But their influence on educational theory and practice has been almost everything good that’s happened in education in the last hundred years, has been done by leftists.

And they thought they were undermining society. You would say to them, if you don’t beat children into conformity, then how will they, how will they work in factories? The right-wing people would say, and the left-wing people would say, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. They were wrong, they were wrong about everything except their educational theory.

So, it’s not that they thought that culture could be transmitted better and also improved by not forcing it. They thought that culture was bad and shouldn’t be transmitted. That was why they did all their good things. And now that they’ve, now that this process is pretty much spent, like you can’t make the classrooms any more pastel-coloured and you can’t speak to the children in nicer ways.

Brett: When I try to explain a more libertarian view of how learning works, it’s: learning just is knowledge creation. 

David: Creation, exactly. 

Brett: And so, what Popper writes about in how science and knowledge broadly is generated, is what’s going on in the mind of the learner. And it just seems to be a logical line to draw that if Popper begins with the project of sciences, you start with the problem.

Then, obviously, any mandated curriculum, even no matter how liberal you want your curriculum to be, and choice of curriculum, you’re handing the student either problems or worse still, the solutions to problems and as you say, I don’t know if you’re quoting Popper when you say, answers to questions not asked.

That’s like the purpose of it.

David: Yeah. Quoting Popper on that one. 

Naval: But if we go to the seven plus five example, that has practical value as well. If the kid doesn’t know how to do seven plus five, they’ll have a hard time navigating our society, which punishes innumeracy.  

David: That’s not true. They will have a hard time or rather they will have a problem when they encounter something like how many shoes can they fit in their wardrobe or whatever.

Once they have that problem and they’re free. They will solve it like that. It’s not hard, it’s not hard learning to add up or learn multiplication tables. Like if you know a few facts, you notice that five fives are 25. If you know that, then it’s easy to work out what six fives are. 

Naval: Like, I grew up in India partially and it was a given that the people who are uneducated had no chance.

And yes, some of them might be because they weren’t in the right institutions, they didn’t make the right connections, they weren’t offered the right jobs. But some of us, they literally had no chance because the only reality they knew was by some point, okay, now I have to start making a living. It’s too late to learn mathematics and accounting.

Now I’m just going to have to carry a bucket full of cement on my head for the rest of my life. And I’m just trapped into that situation. 

David: It could be that society is arranged in such a way that it only allows people to make progress if they, as my friend used to say, if they bear certain scars. It’s not that the scars are functional, but they are like a shibboleth or whatever.

However, I think of the counter examples, one can learn coping mechanisms. It’s supposed to be that you learn the prerequisites in year five, you learn the prerequisites for year six and in year six, you learn, but it’s not true. If you didn’t go to year five, but enter year six, you’d catch up in no time.

And similarly. Being tested for how well you can read stops age 11 or something. And from then on, you’re no longer faced with a situation of read that out loud because the teacher will just assume you can’t. And you, you have coping mechanisms, you have a textbook and the teacher says do the exercises on page 11, and you find that these ways are so painful and unpleasant that most people just knuckle down and learn this stuff by heart, disabling themselves in the process.

Naval: So, what does your school look like? Is it, everyone just stays at home and does what they want? Do they gather? Do they have options? Do they get offered instruments? 

David: Everybody does something different. There is no standard thing that children do that. There will be things that a lot of children do, still not all, but there are things that a lot of children do at a certain age, in a certain culture.

Like if Steven Spielberg produces a new adventure film, then maybe this is, maybe I’m out of date now because people watch it on video. But at the time when Steven Spielberg was making his blockbuster films, ninety percent of the children in a town would go there, and they would sit quietly while the film played, and then they would go out. And there was no, there was no roll call at the beginning, and at the end there was no test, but they all were excitedly speaking about the film and variants of it that they would like to see, and some of them became film directors, and so on. Even that, even somebody who’s a genius enough to attract 90 percent of the children in a culture to come to his event, even he doesn’t have the genius to make the children do that every day.

So that’s how far away the school paradigm is from what could and should be. And now I guess I could say the commenting on recent threads on X, nearly all children want an iPhone. Not all, nearly all, and no, there’s no iPhone curriculum, there’s nothing like that. They do it because they, it’s a rational meme, they think it will benefit them.

And so, people then try to explain that because if they couldn’t explain that, if they couldn’t explain that one thing, never mind the other million things, if they just couldn’t explain that one counter example, their whole educational philosophy would fall apart. 

So they have to say, A: it’s bad for them. And B: it is caused by coercion, namely the coercion of addiction. It causes dopamine. Wait a minute. Dopamine is involved in all pleasure, right? Never mind that. Or, pleasure is bad, right? We all agree with that. Everybody has problems. Children have problems. They grow up having problems. They all have different problems. They try to solve them. They’re powerless and that’s what parents and society are for, to allow them to solve easily soluble problems so they can get on to deep, interesting problems. So easily soluble problems is like having enough food to eat and difficult problems are the problems that, you mentioned India. I saw this documentary about, it was about electricity or something. It was about children. Was it in India? Anyway, somewhere where the children in the evening go out and sit under the street lamps in order to learn. And, oh yes. So, there’s another example, I’ve probably told you, because one of my favourite examples, in [Frederick] Douglass’autobiography, and I haven’t been able to find this passage.

And I’m told it’s because he wrote several autobiographies and they overlap. And I haven’t been able to find the right one, but he described how he learned to read. Slave children learning to read was illegal, not for the slaves. It was illegal to teach them to read, and there were people who would clandestinely teach them, so there were these teenage boys who’d been working in the fields to the maximum extent that you can be forced to work in a field. Then they came home and then they slunk off to this lady’s house where she would be teaching them to read. And if she had been caught, she would have gone to prison and they would have been whipped. So, then he escaped and he got to the north and he made a great success. Now I always think what a terrible tragedy.

There were these teenage boys who were willing to risk a whipping and to go to these lessons when they were already exhausted, physically exhausted from over hard working. And today, their descendants are thought to be, have a low IQ or be perverse and not want to, and anyway, one way or another, they have to be forced into the school to learn. And their ancestors were exactly the other way around, and I think their ancestors were how humans are, that is how humans are, not just black and white, not just teenagers and adults, but all humans. So, probably, those Frederick Douglass and his pals who went to that lady’s house were not all the slaves, probably some of them didn’t go.

Because they didn’t want to, they thought we’d better get a good night’s rest instead. And maybe that was best for them. Who can decide that better than them? Somebody ought to make a movie about this, by the way, because Frederick Douglass is absolutely brilliant in every way. Not as just a little thing.

I can imagine them talking, the ones that went to learn to read, and they would say it, it completely opens your eyes to a different world, if you can read. And they would say, yeah, but I’m tired. And if you meet Steven Spielberg, tell him. 

Wokeism and the West

Brett: Can I play devil’s advocate on the idea of if we extract away schools and we have a, uh, an enlightened fun society where the equivalent of the Steven Spielberg thing is playing and the children go along.

Now, never mind mathematics, but Douglas Murray, my favourite pessimist at times, although he’s optimistic recently, has talked about how it seems as if the West is running out of steam or running out of enthusiasm for itself, as if the story is coming to an end and winding itself up. So, if we move to a place where for all the evils of school, perhaps they’re inculcating at least the students into a version of our traditions and of Western ideals and so on and so forth, because there is no want for enthusiasm in the madrasas, there’s no want for enthusiasm of other cultures wanting to spread their ideas to their children.

Would this alternative to traditional schooling in the West lead to what Murray is worried about, just the exhaustion of the West one.  

David: Well, one problem is, as Naval was saying, that the educational, the schools and universities have been taken over by something that’s very hostile to our culture, so that they’re trying to inculcate a rival culture.

So, I suppose Murray wants to go back to the way the educational system was and yes, horrible and disgusting though it was, it did successfully transmit some things, not the things in the lessons, it transmitted a culture. Then after that era, you had the era of like, in Britain anyway, grammar schools and so on, where they, they tried to make it easy for working class children to get into that culture by having the standard education.

And I was one of those, and then later they closed down all those schools. And then, we got to the present state. I doubt that the older model of schools, like the model of schools that existed between say 1880 and 1950, I don’t think they could survive because the culture, the general culture has changed for the better, like I said. The general culture’s values conflict with the static values of education.

So, I don’t think you could set up that school, that kind of school today. I don’t know what to do about freeing the schools and universities because there isn’t like a cadre of, I call them liberal, genuinely liberal teachers, who could go in to replace them. It’s not like the civil service where you could just overnight reform it by the prime minister just declaring that he’s reforming it, but you can’t do that with schools. So, I don’t know, it has to be gradual.

Naval: In a way they’re the most stuck and frozen institutions. I got a tour of the Oxford colleges recently, some of them, and it was all about tradition. This is exactly the way it was 300 years ago. This is exactly the way it was 150 years ago. And, uh, it was interesting to see a mix of such tradition along with, you know, it’s supposed to be so much new creativity and education.

David: They’ve kept exactly the wrong things and they’ve changed things to exactly the wrong things. So, they still have enacting rituals. But enacting rituals isn’t our culture and on the other hand, they’ve got all sorts of subjects that didn’t exist then because they’re useless. And existing subjects, useful subjects are being taken over.

Richard Dawkins almost got cancelled from previous time when he went to New Zealand and they said that they’re incorporating traditional modes Uh, understanding physics and he was like, no, there is only one mode of understanding physics and they were like, that’s racist. 

Brett: We already have that in Australia.

The syllabus is replete with indigenous modes of doing science. 

David: Well, this was a few years ago, so maybe it’s done in New Zealand and Australia. This is terrible and it’s going to cause everything to deteriorate. I don’t think it will cause the destruction of our culture. But once our culture has deteriorated enough, then the Chinese can walk in.

Naval: I look forward to the indigenous electric motor. 

Brett: There was a, there’s a famous, there was a book written by this, what was his name, Dark Emu is the name of the book, where it’s just a revisionist history that claims that prior to European settlement in Australia, the indigenous people were farming, they had agriculture, they were on their way to factories and all this sort of stuff, and people just lap it up and it’s all, it is making its way into the curriculum now as well.

Bruce Pascoe is his name. He claims to be indigenous, but he’s not. That goes to our capacity to error correct. Misinformation is a fashionable term, but it’s also labels a very genuine phenomenon. There was, I think it was only a few months ago that. Osama bin Laden’s letter to America or whatever was going around being praised by certain college students who thought, yeah, not understanding that this was not a good guy.

David: Okay. So maybe the way to go, if we can’t restore 1950s schools, how about restoring 1950s curricula? That’s something that the government could do. The national curriculum, of course, is an abomination, but maybe it’s one of those things that can be, as a transitional thing, have the national curriculum now, and it’s full of woke stuff.

It’s in the government’s power to change that, to make it into true stuff. The government could change the national curriculum, and then it may be that this woke stuff, I said it’s a fad. It’s not. How can I put this? It’s not an evolved thing. It’s not a blind alley that culture has gone down. It’s a fad.

So, it could be that, that after a generation of teaching old fashioned history, history teachers will think that’s what it is rather than, because it’s the teachers and the pupils are getting the revisionist history at the moment. If they got another history, they even notice? Maybe they wouldn’t even notice, I don’t know, maybe I was too optimistic.

But I get the feeling that it’s all shallow. I think of lefties of the twenties and thirties. They believed stuff. They believed in the capitalist class stealing the fruits of the labour of the working class. And this is why the working class are poor and all that stuff. And the remedy is that they had theory, whereas, I don’t think woke is a theory. 

Brett: Denial of a whole bunch of otherwise good pieces of knowledge, whether it be science or enlightenment ideas. 

David: As I have often said, the negation of an explanation is not an explanation. So, they don’t have a rival worldview, except the worldview that you’re supposed to say certain things.

Not say other things and so on. But it’s not a worldview in the sense that communism was. 

Naval: I think it might be an evolution of communism, because there are a lot of communist ideas at the core of it. And they tend to end up on the same side as the communists, a lot of outcomes.

David: Yeah. But. Do they have a theory that, anything about factories.

Naval: They do have a theory that there, there are people keeping them down, that for example, inflation is up because of price gouging. 

David: So that’s a theory that the left-wing people used to have. They used to have it because it came from their explanation of the world.  

Naval: The finite resource explanation of the world.

David: And, and the more complicated things as well. But I think if you ask a woke demonstrator, maybe I’m wrong, but maybe you could try it. Ask them, how is, how is inflation caused by the greed of the factory owners or whatever it is?

Now, a communist in 1950 could have told you, but I don’t think a woke person today can tell you. Like when they’re asked from the river, they’re chanting from the river to the sea and somebody asks them, which river and which sea and they don’t know.

Naval: But to your earlier point, these anti-rational memes don’t have to be correct. They can drive species extinction and the next species can figure out what was true and what wasn’t. 

David: Yeah. I don’t think that’s what, I don’t think they’re going to, I don’t think they’re poison. I think they are a burden. 

Naval: They could be poisonous in the sense that they drive certain voting blocks and then those voting blocs drive policies of nations. So, I think your homeland is facing exactly this issue, which is now, I think something like 30 percent of the Muslims are in the West and they’re voting. And so, the traditional support for Israel is disappearing. 

David: There are plenty of Muslims who are pro-Israel. The mindless ones are anti-Israel.

Like I just tweeted today that, what’s it called, travelingisrael video blog was talking about the collaboration of the Palestinians with the Nazis during World War II. And he happened to mention, I think he should have made much more of this, that the Grand Mufti was going around Europe recruiting Muslims to the Nazi cause.

In Albania, he totally failed. In Albania, the absolute opposite. They were one of two countries that rescued almost all their Jews. One was Denmark and they didn’t have that many. There was only about 6, 000 in the whole of Denmark, but they rescued almost all of them. But the Albanians, there were a lot of Jews there and a lot of Italian and other Jews had moved to Albania as a refuge and they were all saved because the Albanians as a population thought it was, even as their religion, they thought it was their duty to thwart the deportation of the Jews and they succeeded.

So, this is, as I tweeted as well, this is a counterexample to the narrative that some otherwise cogent commentators, like you just did, assume. It’s not necessarily the case. And it’s also not necessarily the case that, so we’ve had, in Britain, we’ve had Muslim immigrants and then their children are radicalized.

Not them, their children are radicalized. Whose fault is that? That’s not the fault of Islam. That’s the fault of Britain and multiculturalism and pandering to the other and so on, setting up the educational system so that it trashes Britain and glorifies the other and so on. But it needn’t have been, a hundred years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the British army.

Another 50 years earlier, there also were, and they rebelled, but that’s another story, in the Indian mutiny. But then so did the Hindus. So, again, it, it wasn’t Islam, it was the fault of the West. Not for treating them too harshly, in a way for treating them too leniently, they should have been integrated and it should have been understood that the same law applies to them as to everyone else.

I’m a second-generation immigrant and I’m not violent. And my parents came to this country and took for granted that they were going to have to work. And they took for granted that they were going to have to learn English and speak it well and get a job and, and so on, and go to university. And they took for granted all those things.

And the idea that they were owed something by the surrounding culture is quite the opposite. That we owe something to the surrounding culture. That was their attitude. 

Brett: To what extent then is it an existential threat to the UK given you have had these huge protests recently taking over parts of London and I think you’ve had people under the auspices of the Green Party getting in and then coming out as vehemently anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist.

David: Yeah, note that those people aren’t the only people who are being indulged in this way.

Basically, it’s everyone who hates our culture is being indulged and everybody who is afraid of that is being demonized. The government can change that. I think the processes of criticism and persuasion are not impaired. The government isn’t, almost everything that Douglas Murray says about this issue is perfectly legal and is going to remain legal even under the most draconian laws that are currently being proposed, which, by the way, may not succeed.

There’s a lot more to error correction in the British system than merely outvoting the government. There’s going to be all sorts of, because the government, one thing hasn’t changed. The government, no matter how large its majority knows that next week, it could go down if suitable things happen. So, the basic reason that the government is going down this wrong path is that that most people think it’s okay. Most people don’t think this is a disaster. They’re like, okay, we don’t want riots, so let’s have laws against riots. And people are arguing, but these aren’t laws against riots. They’re laws against hate or speech, so on. But that argument hasn’t gone down with enough people. And when it does, it’ll change.

Oh, yes! This is what David Starkey was saying. He was saying that the Red Wall, if you know what that is.

Brett: The Labour voting bloc.

David: Yeah, the Labour voting bloc in Northern England, which changed over to Boris Johnson en masse and changed back at this election. The Red Wall is never going to vote Labour again.

Never, ever, because these measures are against it. The Labour Party has severed its connection with the working class and they got in by a combination of circumstances, because the conservative party was rubbish and the circumstances of the pandemic and all sorts of circumstances made people ready for a change, but they have gone down.

Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily that they’ll never vote Labour again, because there are people in the Labour Party who can, who will be able to see what’s happening long before the next election. And I’m sure that there are people in the Labour Party now who see that they can’t go on like this.

We’ll see, let’s see if the current woke legislation actually goes through when the Labour Party has a majority of a hundred and something. That’s not enough for it to work. Let’s see. And if it goes through, the next level of error correction is that it’ll never be implemented. Like the Home Office people will not order the police chiefs to spend the money to implement the surveillance system, which will be necessary to enforce the law. None of that will happen because on the whole, nothing happens. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with the blob. With the civil service, it prevents everything. To have that happening.the government would have to pursue it.  They would have to pursue it vigorously and ruthlessly firing the people who didn’t implement it and that kind of thing. And only then, and then even then, when the first people go to jail for this kind of thing, there’ll be an, there’ll be an uproar. What are they going to do about it? Are they going to tell all the editors of the newspapers to say that this is improper and it should have happened?

At some point the editors of the newspapers are not going to automatically follow this line either. There will be a niche for people to contradict it. I don’t think anything’s inevitable. And once that problem is solved, by the way. Then the population problem will also be solved because the obvious way of solving the population problem is by immigration.

Mass immigration is the way to go, and we’ve only got to make sure people who hate this country don’t immigrate into it. 

Brett: Ah, but how do you do that?

David: There’ll be, this is something that people who have thought a lot about this, will think a lot about it. At the moment, they’ve been thinking how to do the opposite.

For example, you can have a rule that everybody who is allowed into the country has to declare that they, for a start, love the country and want to do well in it. And then if it later turns out they were lying, they can be deported. Not for being enemies of Britain, but for lying on the immigration form.