Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…But now, today, we have these exabytes of information, so you could just have some sort of ability to search or query, like, I've come up with this theory. I think maybe this is a philosophical difference, where you maybe think that the way that a theory is good is that it best matches the data with some loss minimization. That's not always how new theories, particularly revolutionary theories, come up. There's this famous fact: even when they were moving from a geocentric worldview to a heliocentric worldview, it was so beautiful, the theory, by the time they were finished with the epicycles. I mean, not beautiful. It was so ornate by the time where these planets were moving around the sun but moving on epicycles, that actually the data didn't any better fit the heliocentric worldview than the geocentric worldview, especially since they didn't properly understand the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit around the sun. So it wasn't. Why does one theory replace another? One reason is obviously that it's more consistent with the data, but that's by no means the only theory. And if you just optimize for being consistent with the data, you're going to end up with—if you optimize only for being consistent with the data—you're going to end up with epicycles. You're not going to end up with some beautiful new conceptual thing. Part of the reason people like these new theories is that even though they're maybe not better at matching the data, they are more beautiful, and we'd have to teach—and that's been a reliable guide in the history of science—and we'd have to teach these LLMs beauty. This actually raises an interesting question, which is, in some sense, we have the same problem with human scientists, right? And there's all these people who claim to have a new theory of everything. I guess there's not an easy verifier that everybody agrees to, because some people call them cranks, other people think they're geniuses. But somehow we've solved this problem, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.