Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…One of my colleagues, Tom Henighan, who is a former physicist, made this really nice analogy to me of caloric theory where once upon a time, we thought that heat was actually this thing called caloric. And the reason hot objects would warm up cool objects is the caloric is flowing through them. And because we’re so used to thinking about heat in terms of the modern theory, that seems kind of silly. But it’s actually very hard to construct an experiment that disproves the caloric hypothesis. And you can actually do a lot of really useful work believing in caloric. For example, it turns out that the original combustion engines were developed by people who believed in the caloric theory. So, I think there’s a virtue in taking hypotheses seriously even when they might be wrong. Yeah, there’s a deep philosophical truth to that. That’s kind of how I feel about space travel, like colonizing Mars. There’s a lot of people that criticize that. I think if you just assume we have to colonize Mars in order to have a backup for human civilization, even if that’s not true, that’s going to produce some interesting engineering and even scientific breakthroughs, I think. Yeah. Actually, this is another thing that I think is really interesting. So, there’s a way in which I think it can be really useful for society to have people almost irrationally dedicated to investigating particular hypotheses because, well, it takes a lot to maintain scientific morale and really push on something when most scientific hypotheses end up being wrong. A lot of science doesn’t work out, and yet it’s very useful to… There’s a joke about Geoff Hinton, which is that Geoff Hinton has discovered how the brain works every year for the last 50 years. But I say that with really deep respect because, in fact, actually, that led to him doing some really great work.…

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