Biggest insights from Deutsch

what I’ve mostly learned from DD

I’ve been writing about David Deutsch’s philosophy for quite a while, in a form or another, I appeal to David Deutsch in every blogpost. David’s explanations have significantly improved by world and I consider him a personal hero. He’s an amazing human being, and I believe all his work is rooted in good intentions and he’s someone with high integrity who is extremely careful to do what is right/good. In the podcast, my last question usually is “what’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your life?”, while I’m sure if I were asked that question there would be tons of possible answers, one more objective answer could definitely be the ideas of David Deusch. In this blogpost I’ll explain the biggest insights I’ve gained from reading David’s work and books.

1. No one can teach anything. Once you understand popperian epistemology, you understand how no one can teach you anything and how the entire educational theory is wrong. Even though it may seem that sometimes knowledge does come directly through the senses (more specifically listening, although not necessarily), we always (re)create the knowledge within. “We never speak in a way that we’re not misunderstood” quoting Popper. Instead, we’re constantly guessing what other people are saying and then criticising the guesses and drop the ones that don’t stand to our critical scrutiny. As I wrote here, our education system is precisely based on the view that knowledge is directly transferred from teacher to student. There are several misconceptions in the current educational theory but perhaps the most dangerous one is the idea that there’s some pieces of knowledge that some people have, and those people have the right to decide that the students should get that same piece of knowledge. This is a way to get a society static and prevent the growth of knowledge, a way of avoiding change. This is about preserving existing knowledge instead of creating new knowledge, because indeed, attempts to improve knowledge (or create) risk error. More precisely error that has never occurred, because it’s *new* knowledge.

2. Error correction is the most important mechanism in an institution. Following my last point, school should be optimising for creating new knowledge. And instead of school being afraid of the errors that this new knowledge might cause, it should create a mechanism of error correction. Because errors will be made and that’s okay, we’re fallible, errors are inevitable. So the best way we have of making progress is correcting those errors. Deutsch writes in “the beginning of infinity” that the best hope we have for improving our democratic institutions are institutionalise this error correction mechanism. One way we have is through the voting systems, that’s a way we have of removing bad policies and bad governments but we should be able to do it faster and more efficiently.

3. We shouldn’t prophesy. The world we will be living will be build over knowledge that is yet to be created, so the future is fundamentally unknowable. In today’s world prophesy comes more in the form of doomerism of how civilisation will end, for example Eliezer Yudkowsky in regard to AI. Prophesy arises ultimately from ignorance, from people that don’t have the knowledge that claim to know the effects of that same knowledge.

4. Pessimists are wrong, optimism is the rational approach. Pessimists believe that are barriers to solve a certain problem or situation, they adopt the atitude “there’s nothing I can do” and this is wrong. But deep down both blind optimism and blind pessimism are the same. If you’re a blind pessimist then there’s nothing you can do, if you’re a blind optimist then there’s nothing you need to do. All problems are soluble, there’s no impossible problem (if they aren’t forbidden by the laws of physics, indeed, travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible), so it’s our moral duty to adopt an optimistic outlook. The future is not predetermined so we shall fight for a better world because only progress avoids disaster. Evils come in many forms, but, again, they are forms of ignorance, of not knowing better, all evils are due to the lack of knowledge. The main takeaway about the principle of optimism (all evils are due to the lack of knowledge) is that if we failed at something, we just failed to create the right knowledge. This is an extremely empowering idea, we can solve any problem that the laws of physics don’t prohibit.

5. Always be suspicious of authorities. Tyler Cowen once called David the “first freedom maximalist philosopher”, this is related with David’s philosophy against authoritarianism. As I said before, everyone is fallible, errors are inevitable so the best way we have of making progress is correction those mistakes, an error correction mechanism. But this is precisely the problem with authority, it doesn’t allow an error correction mechanism to occur. This happens because authority implies ideas being hold from criticism, which means that any errors made can’t be corrected, which is ultimately preventing human knowledge from growing and therefore preventing progress. If a problem arises in an area under authority, that problem won’t be solved because the ideas are not open to question. Authoritarianism is also precisely one of the main problems with the education system. The idea that the teacher has the truth and the student should shut up and listen and maximise his efforts in order to get the knowledge the teacher is trying to give.