Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…So, if you just take a rope stretched between you and me and ping it, there will be little vibrations that head over towards you. Those vibrations are subluminal. If it's just a normal rope, they move at the speed of light. For a string or something that saturates null energy condition, it would be faster than the speed of light. That would be an example of why there's something wrong with that proposal. So, it just happens to be the case that the rope cannot mine black holes. I think we've mentioned a couple of other bounds like this where there's no principled reason you might have anticipated ex ante why there would be such a bound that prevents something that just gets in our way, but it just so happens to be this way. Does this suggest that there's some sort of deeper conservation principle we'd be violating? And then the universe conspires to create these engineering difficulties which limit that? Yes, nothing is ever a coincidence. Usually, from the perspective of the story I just told to do with mining black holes, it's not clear what exactly will be broken about the universe if you could mine black holes somewhat faster than we can. There are other ways of thinking about it in which, if you could make a string that was strong enough to actually do it, if you could make a rope that was stronger than this bound, various other things would go wrong. There are various symmetry arguments that that can't happen. But often, it turns out, if we have these bounds, that there's something that sort of saturates the bound or gets very close to the bound. And that's a sign that you're on the right lines with some of these bounds.…

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