135 - Brett Hall

General

Visit Brett’s website, where you can find his blog and much more:
https://www.bretthall.org/

Follow Brett on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Tokteacher

Subscribe to Brett’s YouTube channel:
https://youtube.com/channel/UCmP5H2rF-ER33a58ZD5jCig?sub_confirmation=1

References

Iona’s Substack essay, in which she previously described Brett as a philosopher—a description with which Brett disagreed:
https://drionaitalia.substack.com/p/knots-gather-at-the-comb

Karl Popper’s philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/

Massimo Pigliucci’s Two for Tea appearance:
https://m.soundcloud.com/twoforteapodcast/55-massimo-pigliucci

David Deutsch’s ‘The Beginning of Infinity’:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143121359/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1658005291&sr=8-1

Daniel James Sharp’s Areo review of Ord’s ‘The Precipice’:
https://areomagazine.com/2020/05/11/we-contain-multitudes-a-review-of-the-precipice-existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity-by-toby-ord/

David Hume and the problem of induction:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/

Natural selection and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis:
https://www.britannica.com/science/neo-Darwinism

Richard Dawkins’s ‘The Extended Selfish Gene’:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01MYDYR6N/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1658008393&sr=8-3

Theory-ladenness:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1473221625/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1658010065&sr=8-1

The Popperian ‘paradox of tolerance’ cartoon:
https://images.app.goo.gl/MEbujAKv2VSp1m4B8

For the Steven Pinker Two for Tea interview on ‘Rationality’, stay tuned to the Two for Tea podcast feed as it’s coming soon for public listening:
https://m.soundcloud.com/twoforteapodcast

Brett’s critique of Bayesianism:
https://www.bretthall.org/bayesian-epistemology.html

Brett on morality:
https://www.bretthall.org/morality

Steven Pinker’s book ‘Rationality’:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0525561994/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1658012700&sr=8-1

Timestamps

00:00 Opening and introduction. What, exactly, is Brett? What does he do?

4:58 Free speech and Popperian thought (and what is Popperian thought, anyway?).

12:24 Brett’s view on existential risk and the future; how he differs from the likes of Martin Rees and Toby Ord.

22:38 How can we overcome ‘acts of God’? (With reference to Iona’s syphilitic friend.) The dangers of the unknown and the necessity of progress.

26:50 The unpredictability of the nature of problems, with reference to fear of nuclear war and nuclear energy. The nature and history of problem solving, particularly as regards energy.

37:02 The Popperian/Deutschian theory of knowledge—guesswork, creativity, and the reduction of error.

46:50 William Paley’s watch, Darwinism, selfish genes, and the embedding of knowledge into reality.

54:15 On theory-ladenness, the necessity of error correction, the power of science, and the impossibility of a final theory—all is approximation and continual improvement.

1:01:10 The nature of good explanations, with reference to the invocation of gods vs scientific accounts and the nature of the atom.

1:07:24 How the principle of the difficulty of variability is important in art as well as science, with reference to Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Left Hand of Darkness.’ ‘Aha’ vs ‘what the fuck?’ surprise.

1:15:30 The nature of critical thinking and Brett on education: the misconceptions inherent in the current fashion for teaching critical thinking.

1:26:10 A question for Brett from Twitter: what did Popper really think about tolerance and intolerance (see the famous cartoon on the paradox of tolerance)?

1:36:24 Is there anything else Brett would like to add?