Scaling Knowledge (opens in new tab)

A new blog/podcast about epistemology, AI, startups, and progress.

Inaugural pieces include: - Human Progress via Intellectual Progress (https://scalingknowledge.substack.com/p/human-progress-via-i...) - Knowledge: Burden or Boost? (https://scalingknowledge.substack.com/p/knowledge-burden-or-...) - Criticism and The Ascent of Man (https://scalingknowledge.substack.com/p/criticism)

Would love to hear your feedback and criticism!

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Articles I plan to write:

Optimistic Hard Sci-Fi

Recursive & Social Curiosity

Scaling Laws & Knowledge Infrastructure

Decision-making via hard-to-vary explanations

and much more...

Also tweeted about this here: https://twitter.com/MoritzW42/status/1597327210309885962/

This is very much like the law of excluded middle, (there is a solution) ∨ (there is no solution). The point here I think is that there is no reason to not try to solve problems because either the problem is solvable and we make progress or it isn't and we figure out why which is again a kind of progress. This is certainly a reasonable perspective but Hamming and Heisenberg have quotes that provide more nuanced perspectives.

Hamming: Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

Heisenberg: What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.