Max Bennett: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, the the guardrails thing is interesting because they they are they're not necessarily thinking guardrails. They're also pragmatic guardrails. And there's a really interesting, figure in in in the book, actually. Yeah. Here it is. And it talks about how language is is sharing information over generations. So without language, you know, we learn a little bit inside a generation, then it goes to, you know, pretty much back to 0 again. But now we have the ability to to pass on these memetic bits of information over several generations. But the thing is, there's a real structure to it. I think of it as a bit like, you know, a directed acyclic graph. So it's a tree structure, and every single bit of knowledge that we discover kind of stands on the shoulders of giants. So it needs all of the things that we discovered beforehand. So in a sense, you know, we're all of these little agents, and we're doing this epistemic foraging. So we're, you know, we're finding new skill programs, we're sharing them, and so on. But it's almost like we shouldn't think of the mass as being like an entire convex hull. It's only on the boundary where all of the creativity and and all of the information sharing happens, you know, like on the surface of this object that that's being created. And what I mean by that is, like, now in modern cities, for example, you can't live without a driver's license. You can't live without the Internet. You need to do things a certain way. And even though it's not technically constraining our brains and how we think, like, live in a very, very constrained and weird world now. Yeah. Totally great point. There's we are there's a biological constraint as to how much knowledge a given human brain can contain. And so 1 lens through which to see the last, you know, 100000 years, especially the last, you know, hundred years, is us finding solutions to getting past the biological constraint of human brains. Language was 1 tool because it used to be the case that all of the information that a given entity learned needed to be learned by my brain, within my lifetime. And language enables us to our group to have shared knowledge, but not every brain contains all of the knowledge. So if you think about a troop of a 100 a 100 people, it's possible for that 100 people and all their descendants for 1000 years to have tons of skills despite the fact that any 1 brain never had all of the skills. So someone becomes really good at, you know, hunting. Someone becomes really good at weaving animal skins into clothing and all of these types of skills. And actually, there are cases in anthropology of groups of humans that get separated from each other of their technology degrading because there is a limit. There is a a minimum number of brains needed to contain, and store a certain amount of information in the absence of writing. And so writing, language was maybe innovation 1 here. Writing was another innovation, which is great. Now we can more reliably transfer these ideas across generations even if there are gaps. In other words, even if there's a period of time for maybe 2 generations, no brains contain it. A third generation go back to the writing and pick up that knowledge. And then, of course, now with, you know, with the Internet, have just scaled up writing even more. But you're absolutely right. You know, sometimes I think about this as like, you know, if me and a group of 20 friends ended up on an island, how much of human and we were the only 20 humans left, not that I think about this all the time. But it is it is crazy how little of human knowledge would be contained in our 20 brains. How how dramatically we would degrade. Essentially, like, we've got this thing where we've got all of these different brains, and individual people can, you know, have about a 150 friends or something. You know? It's it's the the social Dunbar limit. But as you say, because we have, like, this ability to to share simulations and we have common myths and so on, we can actually address a much larger carrying capacity of of people and and knowledge. And and, actually, you said something really interesting in the book, which is 4 things. Right? So bigger brains, specialization, more brains, bigger population size, and writing and sharing simulations and the Internet and all of these things. So so we've increased our carrying capacity and, like, now something very interesting and arbitrary has emerged. So we've got all of these different specializations of skills. And I guess the question is, where does it end? Has it converged? Like, could could we could we carry much more knowledge than we already have, or would we have to wait for a top down kind of genetic pressure for our brains to get a bit bigger again?…

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