Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That's exactly what I was gonna say. This happens first in France and then Britain, but you get royal societies for science where you're doing really... I would say there's like three things that are essential there. One is the promotion of what we would call basic or fundamental science. It doesn't all have to be immediately practical or commercialized. But you're promoting deep knowledge of nature. Two, you're doing it in an empiricist way. This is something very important in the 17th century that the Romans by contrast don't have, is the spirit of Francis Bacon that we need to ground our knowledge in experiment and observation, not just believe whatever authorities or Aristotle said. That's very much the spirit of places like the Royal Society: we don't take things on anybody's word, especially Aristotle's. You need basic science. You need empiricism, rigorous and self-correcting. Third, you need a sense of useful knowledge, and that's the other thing that really comes together in the 17th century: not just the basic and abstract science, but the application, and the 17th century language for that is useful knowledge. That is something that doesn't ever get wired together in the Roman Empire. There are tinkerers and engineers, but they're not talking to the mathematicians and the physicists. If you were from on high to design self-sustaining innovation, I think you would want to bring those elements into proximity. Augustus, unfortunately for them, didn't do it. Probably good for the world. The Romans are pretty nasty people in a lot of ways. I definitely am of the opinion that the high science matters, that Isaac Newton is not a tinkerer. He's not building pumps. But the guys who are are his friends. They're in and around the Royal Society, and they're absolutely... Look at Denis Papin, who was a French engineer who was very much in the circle of Leibniz and the very high abstract mathematics, trying to build vacuum pumps. The proximity of high math, high science, very abstract with what is ultimately gonna be the sectors that lead to mechanization where then you can harness this source of energy that is there all along but hasn't been tapped in coal. That's what catalyzes the big positive cycle of positive feedbacks. What the Romans don't have is that. What the Romans do have is the kind of specialization, and now that we look for it, it's there. When you look at food processing, which is a huge sector, the way that they built mills, there's definitely improvements. But there's never the catalytic change where you get runaway positive feedbacks That's right. A previous guest of mine, Nat Friedman, I don’t know if you saw this, launched this challenge called the Vesuvius Challenge. This library at Herculaneum in 79 AD was buried under the ashes of Mount Vesuvius when the volcano erupted; speaking of volcanoes. Now they figured out with modern techniques how to read the burned scrolls and it is supposedly the biggest library of classical text ever. It would double the amount of classical text we have. As a scholar of ancient Rome, what would you personally find most fascinating? What are you excited to find from this data? I'm super interested in the history of math. What happens after Euclid? It's very hard to say because you get these really interesting people that pop up, like Diophantus who's later, in the early Roman Empire. There's still really interesting math going on. Euclid is incredible. The Greek experiment in math and science is the one that I think had the better chance of sparking sustained takeoff. And it didn't. It'd be interesting to know more about why. Why did things stall? Because these people... Euclid is not just a towering genius who comes out of nowhere. He's very much a product of the culture and the questions that are being asked in the generations before. It just sort of feels like after him, you fail to get that kind of sustained continuous progress and advance. Maybe back to that big question that we were asking before: what prevents the kind of breakthroughs that we see in the modern world?…

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