Naval shares lessons from Elon's biography and explains why real inspiration and learning come from doing, not just thinking or reading| Podcast Notes
My coming-out post on why I'm no longer an AI doomer seems to have struck a nerve. Hundreds of people responded across reddit, substack, twitter, email, podcasts, etc, which I'd like to say is just another day at the office for a Very Successful Blogger like me, but is in fact fairly unusual. There are too many threads to reply to individually, so I thought I'd condense the general thrust of the criticisms and respond to the best comments here. And they were (mostly) very good! I've ended up ...| Deep Dish
As one moves between the general and the specific, two things that vary are (1) accuracy and (2) reach. Accuracy: how well your policy, design, idea, opinion describes the real facts of reality, how few exceptions and edge cases there are. Reach: how many facts of reality or units or instances your policy, design, or idea describes or accounts for. Accuracy is related to depth and focus; reach is related to breadth and speed. Both are important, and they’re in necessary conflict. This conf...| Meta is Murder
One of the most significant intellectual errors educated persons make is in underestimating the fallibility of science. The very best scientific theories containing our soundest, most reliable knowledge are certain to be superseded, recategorized from “right” to “wrong”; they are, as physicist David Deutsch says, misconceptions: I have often thought that the nature of science would be better understood if we called theories “misconceptions” from the outset, instead of only after w...| Meta is Murder
IT'S BEEN A COUPLE YEARS since I did one of these roundups, during which time book club has really lifted my reading game, and so the pool of contenders has a lot of depth this year. After much agonising I've winnowed my favourite reads down to a top 10. The list ended up heavy on classics and big names, with fewer underrated or self-published authors—wow, Hemingway is a great read, no kidding—but I think that also tells you something. I've also read quite a bit of contemporary fiction—...| Deep Dish
What makes humans special? How is it that we are able to unleash the energy of the atom, transmute handfuls of sand into powerful djinn, and generally manipulate matter in any way not strictly forbidden by the laws of physics, while our hominid ancestors gather dust in the natural history museum? What tectonic forces have torn such a chasm between us and our surviving cousins, still banging rocks together in the animal kingdom? For most of history this was no great mystery: only humans have a...| Deep Dish
Pound-for-pound The Beginning of Infinity has to be the densest collection of batshit-crazy ideas I've ever come across. Never mind the bit about how there are trillions of copies of you constantly branching throughout the multiverse. Deutsch also claims there is nothing in principle stopping us from colonising the stars, transmuting matter like the alchemists of old, bringing an end to death, reversing global warming, and solving any other problem that arises. But that's not ambitious enough...| Deep Dish
Dear Vote Leave supporters LET’S HONOUR THE REFERENDUM RESULT AND GET BREXIT DONE SO THE COUNTRY CAN MOVE ON Summary: Tell your family and friends face-to-face: if Boris doesn’t get a majority, the…| Dominic Cummings's Blog