Mike Israetel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…They're made out of particles. That that that is Yeah. But you're not made out of neutrinos. They're passing through you. The neutrinos are completely abstracted as far as we're concerned. They actually pass through the Earth the entire time. So like, there's all kinds of theoretical physics that have nothing to do with you really in a causal graph. They don't affect your behavior. They haven't really meaningfully affected any of your decisions. We we have to abstract like 18 layers and do quantum mechanics that none of us are, I don't know, you're probably smart enough to get it. I'm not. And so like that shit's really shit in the real world that we're purely abstracting to. But because knowledge is actually representing the real world, it works. With the the the I'm not I'm not so sure if you could explain what it is exactly you're getting at that we get out of embodied experience, and how libraries, and education curricula, and schools, and reading a bunch of books can possibly give you knowledge if none of that is any kind of experience that is embodied. Like how does Chatuchipiti know the vibe of Shinjuku in Tokyo and can accurately render to me what the vibe feels like if it's never been to Tokyo, same way a travel agent does. But it's real, actual things they know. That when you go there, you're like, oh fuck, it's pretty much correct. How does that work? Well, of all, should distinguish knowledge and understanding. So many people have different definitions of this. In the cognitive sciences, people talk about factual knowledge, which is just states of affairs. There's procedural knowledge knowing what to do. There's conceptual knowledge knowing how to think. And roughly speaking, I make the designation that knowing states of affairs and understanding is this ability to generate new knowledge. So if you have an understanding of the world, which means you know it at an abstract level, you can do this Lego building in your mind. And you can create new knowledge. But the simple grounding problem is something a little bit different, even with the neutrinos. That we use this thing David Crankowicz calls it the principle of materiality, which is that we use the world to think. And many of the abstractions that we've converged on over millions of years of evolution is because we have this shared physical world. So you and I both understand similar abstractions which are derived from our sensory motor circuits and from language and so on. And it means that we can talk at a very abstract level. Because we're both players in the same game, we understand each other. And the parlor trick and we won't go over Charles' Chinese Rim argument. I'm sure you're familiar with it. He was saying exactly the same thing. But basically, a computer can tell you all of these things as if they understood. And you understand because you actually have the feeling. You actually know. Even though you've never been to Japan, you've experienced many things that are like people that go to Japan experience. So you have some kind of a shared understanding. There is this intersection in your understanding tree that something like ChatGPT doesn't have. Now, I wanna make a distinction as well. I'm really impressed with language models. You know, Opus 4.5 came out yesterday.…

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