Notes of Brett&Naval’s Clubhouse show (Navalhouse) 16 february 2021

• Beginning of infinity by David Deutch is “Maybe the best book I’ve ever read in the genre of things that are directly useful” (the most useful book I’ve ever read)
• Naval’s most listened podcast recently is Brett Hall’s TOKCAST
• Using our capacity to explain the world, we can improve things
• In all domains, we are searching for the best explanation and that explanation represents reality in some way but it’s never the final thing, and that’s a good thing because it means we can go on forever making progress
• Science is not about extrapolation, science is about explanation

A good explanation is:
1. Falsifiable

2. It has to make narrow (precise) and risky predictions

3. Hard to vary

• Ergodicity: what is true for the group on average is not necessarily true for the individual averaged out over repeated iterations.
• Freedom of speech — All truth-seeking systems work the same way. If you work through science you make all conjectures and they’re subject to criticism by your peers and by experiment.
• If we want to be successful as a society, kind of all we need to do is just embrace error correction. Constant feedback and error correction.
• Democracy is not about electing the most ideal people. Democracy is a system for removing bad leaders when they arise.
• All democratic systems need to be judged on the basis that they make it easy to remove the leader or to change the policy without violence.
• All components of the theory (explanation) have some causal purpose, creating a long chain of causation.
• Nothing is a resource absent the knowledge that enables us to use it as a resource.
• One of the dominant paradigm in our society is a zero-sum mentality. One of the things you have to get over to be successful as a human being is a zero-sum mentality, finite resource mentality.
• There is an infinite amount of raw materials in the universe. The only thing that prevents is using knowledge to progress to convert those raw materials into whatever we want
• The only sin is preventing error correction from letting us create the knowledge that we want
• If you’re too scared, you give up all your rights, you give up all your power, you slow down your innovation.
• If the market crashes it is called correction for a very good reason — because something went wrong. A market is not a way of perfect economic progress every single day. What the market is going to do is trial things out the same way the scientist in the laboratory is going to conduct an experiment. Failing is part of the process of making progress.

How this can improve your life:
- Become an error-correcting machine in everything that you do especially when the feedback comes from the market and nature — because that’s valid.
- In your personal life if you want to get good at something you just iterate at it as many as you can.

• The only way to learn is to be a beginner and putting yourself out there and you have to be willing to be proven wrong
• “Nullius in Verba” — just because a person is credentialed does not mean they know better.
• “To the average person what’s fascinating is if you read the first three chapters of Beginning of infinity and you understand them, for the first time in your life you will have a very tight and precise definition of what science is. You will understand how human knowledge advances. You will have a basis for separating falsehood from the truth from unknowable. You will understand why it is rational to be optimistic as long as we have free speech and enlightenment bureau values. You will understand why we are always going to be able to create more resources and don’t have to worry about the Malthusian trap. You will probably revisit what you think about sustainability on this planet, what you think about humans as to how exceptional are we, how capable are we… You will probably walk away with a different worldview of AGI (artificial general intelligence), if it’s possible and where it’s going… you may rethink political systems you may rethink child-raising.”

Books mentioned:

The mind of God — Paul Davies
The Fabric of Reality — David Deutsch
Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch