A vaccine for collective amnesia

Greetings from the far north on summer solstice, where the sun apparently goes down but just barely. I’m on a trip to the Scottish isles, where the sun didn’t set until 10.18pm last night, and even then it remained an eerie blue twilight almost until the morning broke.

Copies of More Everything Forever are now in nearly everyone’s hands, and I hope you’re digging in and enjoying them. But even if you’re not reading it right now, perhaps saving the book up for the future or just looking at it with lukewarm interest, I wanted to look a little more at the approach the book takes.

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And that starts with its author. Adam Becker is an astrophysicist by training, and the center of More Everything Forever is essentially an application of his scientific knowledge against the wilder claims of the techno-oligarchs and their own in-house philosophers. With Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos spreading amazing claims about, say, the possibilities of space exploration, technological progress, or the singularity, Becker asks what the scientific basis or likelihood of their claims actually is. He’s pairing “here’s what they actually say” with “here’s how that is functionally impossible.”

It’s worth saying that he rarely argues that something is totally impossible, since you don’t know what you don’t know, but he instead points out that the line of thinking under scrutiny usually relies on a super-powerful artificial intelligence (that is, a product that we haven’t seen yet) generating some technological innovation (an advance which we haven’t seen yet) which enables us to change the laws of physics (in a way we haven’t seen yet.) 

Is this exaggerated claim more common in areas of science than elsewhere? Maybe not, but proposals that involve complex scientific concepts and technologies often feel harder for untrained folks to push back against because it’s genuinely hard to wrap your head around. The scales and sizes and speeds that they talk about can seem almost within reach, even if we are billions of orders of magnitude away from what’s necessary. And so this creates domino effect thinking that can often be compelling. After all, these folks are experts, right?

No, says Becker, they are absolutely not experts. Or at least, they are experts in some things, but not others; they have other agendas they are trying to achieve with their claims or their beliefs. The result is often a line-by-line debunking of the scientific or technological underpinnings of some of the things that techno-oligarchs want to achieve. 

As he put it in an interview with Tech Policy Press: “They have found a philosophy and ideology about how the world works, almost a religious faith about how the world works, that is based on very little actual information about how the world works. There’s no science to support it, and a great deal of science and other things that cut against it.”

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In some ways, More Everything Forever is a book-length treatise on Gell-Mann Amnesia. That’s the effect where we immediately understand how unreliable a particular source is when they are talking about things we have knowledge of, but quickly forget that unreliability when they begin talking about beyond our expertise. It’s named after the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and was coined by his friend the novelist, Michael Crichton:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

Gell-Mann Amnesia is mainly meant to be about the media, and why we’re not sceptical enough of the things we see, hear and read there, but it goes for anyone with a powerful voice and claims to authority, too. Because somebody is rich or successful, society has a tendency to assume their knowledge in one domain translates, more or less, into any other area they turn their attention to. Becker’s really trying to address this problem by comparing the stated beliefs of Silicon Valley overlords with what is actually true or achievable in scientific terms. 

I know that some folks feel like this is giving too much credence to them; that it’s fundamentally foolish to assume these people actually believe what they say. Ed Zitron, one of the more vituperous critics of AI, has said as much: that their words are merely a thin veneer over their ideological or political projects, and that to engage with “we should colonize deep space!” as an honest belief is to fall for the misdirection. 

But I think it is actually worth taking them at their word regardless of whether they truly believe what they say. After all, part of the spell they cast is through other people’s belief, and through exploiting the gap between true experts and lay people. And Becker’s not just debunking: pointing out the things that people actually say is, in cases of extreme behavior, actually intended to remind us how far away from rational behavior some of these people are.

I don’t know if there is a vaccine against Gell-Mann Amnesia, but perhaps it’s regular injections of truth.

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Now, whether or not that’s enough for you is a personal decision. But we’ll get in depth on these things and more when we talk with Adam live next week, on Friday June 26 at 1pm Eastern / 10am Pacific. This is earlier in the day than our typical calls, since I’ll still be overseas, but I hope you can make it. An email will go out in advance with login details if you want to join us for a conversation, and I’d love to see you there!

Onwards

Bobbie