Guillaume Verdon: recommendation

Transcript context

…Just a little on that, isn’t that interesting that one of the things that people don’t often talk about is that when there’s pressure and constraints on speech, it somehow leads to constraints on thought even though it doesn’t have to. We can think thoughts inside our head, but somehow it creates these walls around thought. Yep. That’s sort of the basis of our movement is we were seeing a tendency towards constraint, reduction or suppression of variants in every aspect of life, whether it’s thought, how to run a company, how to organize humans, how to do AI research. In general, we believe that maintaining variance ensures that the system is adaptive. Maintaining healthy competition in marketplaces of ideas, of companies, of products, of cultures, of governments, of currencies is the way forward because the system always adapts to assign resources to the configurations that lead to its growth. And the fundamental basis for the movement is this sort of realization that life is a sort of fire that seeks out free energy in the universe and seeks to grow. And that growth is fundamental to life. And you see this in the equations actually of equilibrium thermodynamics. You see that paths of trajectories, of configurations of matter that are better at acquiring free energy and dissipating more heat are exponentially more likely. So the universe is biased towards certain futures, and so there’s a natural direction where the whole system wants to go. So the second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy is always increasing in the universe that’s tending towards an equilibrium. And you’re saying there’s these pockets that have complexity and are out of equilibrium. You said that thermodynamics favors the creation of complex life that increases its capability to use energy to offload entropy. To offload entropy. So you have pockets of non-entropy that tend the opposite direction. Why is that intuitive to you that it’s natural for such pockets to emerge?…

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