Dwarkesh Patel: commitment

Transcript context

…As of the twelfth century. Because everybody’s in the merchant world, so you have to be able to send letters. You have to be able to read account books. You have to be able to calculate your tab at a restaurant. But of those people, how many have read a book? Very few. They’ve read letters, they’ve read tallies, they’ve read indexes, they’ve made notes. The difference between being literate and being book-literate is different. In the same way that some people watch television but don’t watch very many films, while other people watch lots of films. You can be literate and have never read a book because there might be almost no books in the entire city in which you grew up if it’s 1200 or 1500. But if it’s 1600, there are definitely books in any medium-sized town. So literacy transforms into access to scientific, intellectual, legal, all sorts of different worlds of ideas. The other person you quoted who’s talking about transformations in networks of power from being less family and clan-centered to being more guild-centered… The guilds are major generators of ideas as well. The guilds can own libraries by 1600. If you went to a guild hall, it will have a bunch of books about its own trade. That would not have been true in 1100. Those changes are all real, they’re all intermixing, and they’re all parallel to each other. You need all of these things together. One of the focuses I have is sometimes there are more steps to something than you think. We tell this story of the Renaissance, of how they rediscovered these ancient texts, and then we got science. That’s true, but it is an oversimplification and too wide a zoom. If I said that in the French Revolution, Napoleon rose to power and spread nationalized warfare across Europe, and then we landed on the moon, I’ve skipped some steps. We know that about modernity, but we don’t remember that about earlier periods. Obviously all the stories are somewhat true, but to the extent that this is a part of the story, you’re building up libraries of classics and … setting up a network of information exchange that leads to the Scientific Revolution… The reason this feels salient right now is that a lot of people have this idea that they’re going to make AI go well by doing X thing. Maybe some of those things work, but it’s at the same time frustrating but also funny and interesting that historically nobody has a good track record of being able to say, “I will do this thing so that this huge unanticipated change in history will go my way, or according to my values. ” Right. I think “go my way” as opposed to “go well” is a really important distinction. Petrarch wanted a world with these values. He thought, for example, that this would be a triumph for Christianity and what we would call Catholicism, though there’s only one Christianity from his point of view at the time, except for the East, which is different. He was sure that when we found the ancients, fundamentally all of their philosophy would agree with Christianity. The ancients were wise, therefore they will be correct, and Plato will ninety percent agree with Christianity. It just needs a little shaker of the Trinity on top to be Christianity. When he says, “Go find these ancients,” he is in a world that doesn’t have the ancients yet. He’s just guessing what’s going to be in these books. But he says, “If we find them, they will uphold good values,” and everyone believes him. Then they go find them, and they squabble with each other. There are Hedonists and Epicureans and Stoics and all sorts of chaotic things, much more plural than he anticipated. It makes a world that in turn has giant wars, which he would not like, and a crisis, and Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients, and then the new science and the new philosophy, and eventually Galileo, none of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if he had specifically described the future he was trying to make. But then we get to the propagators of Bacon’s scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu, who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox. The first major disease eradications start to begin under that immediate influence. Science gets us to the germ theory of disease gets us to modern hygiene, which gets us to vaccines, which gets us to penicillin and the treatment for the Black Death. Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values. Instead, he made a world that doesn’t share his values but is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. If you showed him this future, it would be scary. It would be weird to him because it does not embrace his values. Our values are different. He would be horrified by democracy. He believed that only a tiny elite has the capacity to rule. If we had a time-traveling Petrarch, he would really wrestle for a long time to wrap his head around democracy as a functional system. He really thought in oligarchic terms. But he would see the wonders we’ve created, especially the fact that we can treat the Black Death, and he would weep for joy seeing that. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well. We have many examples of that. Trains and bicycles come in, and we get feminism because it’s easier for people, especially women, to move freely and independently. They can organize. They can mobilize. We get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women’s liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes.…

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