"I'm talking about a nuclear war. If you live in a city that has an important industry,
a large airport, there is a hydrogen bomb that's aimed at you right now."
"I'm going to describe how the gains we make in artificial intelligence
could ultimately destroy us. In fact I think it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us."
"It's the kind of belief system of people who say I don't believe in god,
I believe in science. It's a belief system which has now been spread to the entire world."
If you could only pick one human achievement as the source of all the things we think
of as progress, what would it be? Most people would say science. Science is the reason that
life expectancies keep rising year after year. Science is the reason that food is so abundant and
conveniently available in the western world. And it's the reason you're able to watch this video
on your computer. And these achievements are so dazzling, that it's led to a growing faith that
science will soon discover all the important truths of human life. This is what many people
have called "scientism" which is the belief that science is the only true source of knowledge
about the world. That an idea is only valid if it's arrived at through a scientific process.
And it's important at this point to distinguish between science, which is a set of tools and
methods for investigating nature, and scientism, which is an ideology that science has no
boundaries. And that all human problems can be understood only through science alone. And it
seeks to insert science into every area of human life, even in areas where it might not apply.
Over the years this view has become so widespread that even calling something non-scientific
has become an insult. And so while science is a methodology for discovering things
about our world, and which can be used for good or bad, "scientism" is a world view
that assumes that science is the best and only valid perspective. To be absolutely clear,
this video is not a critique of science, it's a critique of scientism. So what's wrong with it?
"You want to get really nuts? Yes. It's time to leave
time to leave. What? This planet. Our wisdom may have increased slightly,
maybe it didn't, I don't know, but our power is now godlike. We are now gods but for the wisdom."
These are the words of Eric Weinstein, a Harvard mathematician and managing director of Thiel
Capital. So what does he mean by this? Beginning in 1953, we started a clock with two crucial
events in human history. The first was unlocking the ability to make atomic devices, the first of
which was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the end of World War 2. The second was Watson
and Crick's discovery of the three-dimensional structure of DNA. Once a species learns to unlock
these two abilities, and harness the powers of the atom, and the cell, it enters uncharted
territory. Because very soon, we will have access to god-like power. To weapons so powerful that
they can destroy the earth many times over. And to technology that gives us the ability to edit
and change our own DNA. These are the powers to manipulate nature in ways we've never seen.
And it's also the power to bring unimaginable chaos and annihilation. But the question is do we
have the wisdom to use these powers responsibly? Especially given our history of conflict,
short-sightedness, and irrationality. Weinstein calls this the Twin Nuclei problem and he argues
that the world's most serious people should all be working on how to solve it. Because if we can't,
it could spell the end of humanity. And we are now living on borrowed time. Weinstein
isn't alone here. In 1947, members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists created the
Doomsday Clock which represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe. And just like a
clock that's counting down, it's a metaphor for the destruction that will happen unless
we take action to stop it. And as of January 2021 the clock is set at 100 seconds before midnight.
The Doomsday Clock does have its critics, but the overall point remains: we are living in a time of
unprecedented threat to our existence. And if we are to survive, we need the wisdom and humility
to understand the limits of science. To understand the things that science can do,
and the things it can't. This is the first step to using it responsibly.
So what are those limitations? Let's look at two main ones in this video.
In the 1700s, a philosopher named David Hume described what's now known as the problem
of induction. Science works through something called inductive reasoning,
which is when we observe things from our own experience and then make generalizations
about what we've seen, applying them to the world into new situations we haven't seen. A
classic example comes from swans. In the 1600s, europeans believed that all swans were white.
Their reasoning would have looked something like this: Every swan we've ever seen is white.
Therefore every swan is white. And each time they saw another white swan, their confidence in the
conclusion would grow stronger. But in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamigh discovered
black swans which he found in Australia. This shows us the limitations of inductive reasoning,
but it's not just that science can't logically guarantee the truth of its conclusions.
It goes deeper than that. Inductive reasoning relies on the assumption that the things we've
yet to experience must resemble the things we have experienced. And that the course of nature always
remains the same. In other words, it assumes that nature is uniform. This is known as the principle
of uniformity of nature. For example science tells us that the speed of light is a constant,
that it always travels at 299 million 792 458 meters per second. This fact is the cornerstone of
much of modern physics but how do we know that the speed of light has always been this way? Or that
it will continue to be this way in the future? The answer is that we can't know it. We have to make
that assumption from our own limited experience. And we can see this in the work of physicist Joao
Magueijo who is exploring the possibility that the speed of light was different in the past. That
it may have been much faster in the universe's infancy than it is today. The nature of inductive
reasoning is such that even scientific laws don't express absolute certainty, it's always possible
that a scientific law can be contradicted, restricted, or extended by future observations.
And this makes sense because we've only been doing science for maybe a few thousand years,
which is a blink in time, compared to the estimated age of the universe, which is at least
13.8 billion years old. For us to make universal conclusions that are claimed to work every time,
and in every area of the universe, is the height of hubris. And the vast majority of scientists
understand. This they realize that science is a tentative process and that any conclusions they
draw are modest and can change at any time. It's mainly the ideologues who push for scientism,
who extend these conclusions to areas that they were never meant to be applied. So why
is this important to the problems we're facing? Because in order to use science responsibly,
we have to be honest with ourselves about the conclusions that science allows us to draw.
And when proponents of scientism say that science and only science will solve every
one of our problems, they're making a very similar kind of argument. That because science
has solved many problems in our past, therefore science will solve every problem of human life.
Implicit in this is the assumption that the very same mindsets that brought us here,
to the brink of global catastrophe are the very same mindsets that will bring us out of it.
The philosopher David Hume is also famous for articulating what would become known as the
Is-Ought problem. David Hume distinguishes between two different kinds of statements. The first are
statements of fact, which is the realm of science. And which tries to describe the universe as it is.
But the second type are moral statements, they don't describe anything, they tell us what we
should or shouldn't do. Hume points out that if we could list every single fact about the world as it
is, we would never be able to logically derive a statement about what we should or shouldn't do,
because these are fundamentally different kinds of statements. In other words,
science can never prove that something is morally right or wrong. Any knowledge about morality has
to come from somewhere outside of science. But on March 22nd 2010, Sam Harris argued in a Ted
talk that science can solve moral problems. He says that in principle, there are right and wrong
answers to moral questions in the same way that there are right and wrong answers to questions
of physics. As science advances in areas of brain cognition and consciousness studies,
he argues that we'll be able to make scientific conclusions about how to maximize what he calls
"human well-being." This seems to fly in the face of Hume's Is-Ought problem and if Sam Harris is
right, it means that fundamentally there's no difference between a statement like "water boils
at 100 degrees celsius" and a statement like "discrimination is wrong." But is he right?
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll makes a counter-argument where we imagine two situations.
In the first situation suppose that we have a choice to end the life of a seventy-year-old woman
against her will, and then transplant her heart into the body of a twenty-year-old man,
which would add more years to his life. Would you be okay with doing that?
Most people would find this to be very wrong. But let's increase the numbers. Let's imagine a second
situation where the only way to save two thousand people is to end the life of one unwilling victim.
Would you be okay with doing that? Sean Carroll argues that in these morally ambiguous situations,
does anyone think that scientific research in neuroscience or anywhere else,
is going to give us a definitive answer to the question of exactly when it's okay to sacrifice
someone's life for the collective well-being? That for example there's a way to scientifically prove
that if you can save the lives of say 1,634 people that you're morally right to sacrifice someone's
life, but if it's only 1,633 people then we shouldn't do it? What this touches on is the fact
that no amount of scientific research alone can answer moral questions. Positions like the ones
from Sam Harris are classic examples of scientism. Because he's trying to apply science to areas that
it fundamentally can't answer. To take this even further, imagine that Sam Harris ran an experiment
that showed that some amount of discrimination actually increased overall well-being for the
majority of people in that society. Would that mean that discrimination is now morally good?
Sam Harris would have to conclude that it is. But i would argue that discrimination is wrong
for reasons that aren't scientific at all. What makes discrimination wrong has to do with values
regarding equality and justice. And these values are completely separate
and outside the realm of science. This is one of the major things that scientism gets wrong.
Because there's a real danger in misusing science to further political agendas
under the guise of objectivity. If someone can show that their ideology is scientific,
then it lends a kind of perceived legitimacy that people are less likely to question.
Of course the misuse of science is nothing new. In 1935, Nazi Germans like Heinrik Himmler tried
to organize scientific research to demonstrate their biological superiority, in order to justify
the horrific policies that they would enact in the second world war. Again the implication is clear.
We have to understand the limits of science and the questions that it can and can't answer.
That's the only way that we can have the wisdom to use it responsibly.
As Eric Weinstein points out, we are now gods but for the wisdom. For reasons i'll explore
in the next video, the solutions to these questions might not lie in science at all.
But in looking back and understanding the ancients. How they lived in the past
and how some groups of people still live today. We have a tendency to dismiss these traditions
as "primitive" but each of them represents an unbroken chain of wisdom that traces back to the
beginning of human history. They're tested and they've worked for thousands of years.
By comparison our way of living has no historical precedent whatsoever. We're all living a brand
new collective experiment. If this next video is available to watch you'll see it appearing here
on the left, but if it's not yet available, then I invite you to watch the video on the right.
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As always, thanks for watching, take care of yourselves, and i'll see you in the next video.