Logan

Individualism & Egalitarianism: It is the individual—not the tribe, not the family, not the society—who has the capacity to explain the world, to understand it, to suffer, to be happy, to make choices, to create explanatory knowledge. This kind of individualism is a devastating criticism of every collectivistic idea past and present—collective justice, guilt by blood, racism, classism, and policies intended to help a ‘community’ as defined by the set of all individuals with a particular characteristic. Moreover, there is only one kind of individual—any person is as capable of making progress, experiencing any physically possible qualia, and generating knowledge as any other. It is in this sense that egalitarianism is true. People are not equal in terms of skill, interest, genes, phenotype, wealth, opportunity, nor life experience. But people are equal with respect to their ability to generate new knowledge and continuously solve the endless stream of problems that defines their lives. Indeed, knowledge creation is the most egalitarian enterprise in existence.

Two major advances for Western science were: 1. The development of logic, and 2. the realization that we can discover causal relationships. Inspired by Turing, I have tried to put the two together... ~Conjecture Institute Advisor @yudapearl

@ToKTeacher: What makes Conjecture Institute [Fellow] @dela3499's AGI research unique so far as you are aware of? @DavidDeutschOxf : Oh, as far as I'm aware, he's the only person working full-time on AGI who understands the first thing about it.

Wonderism is perhaps the first attempt to systematise a truly rational, hopeful theory of aesthetics. I agree with Ayn Rand when she said that “Those who feel that art is outside the province of reason would be well-advised to leave this book alone.” And I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that we must “Give to barrows, trays, and pans / Grace and glimmer of romance”. The only tenable theory of art is rational. And the only rational use of art is everywhere. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_

Free Will and the Quantum Multiverse Some worry that if everything happens, then nothing we do matters, as if we’re passengers on a train of predetermined splits. But free will is branch-relative. Inside your branch, you still make decisions, and those decisions still cause real effects in that branch. The fact that other versions of you are making different choices in other branches doesn’t reduce your agency, instead, each version of you is a genuine continuation of the original, exercising choice in their own storyline. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @maxdesalle

Conjecture Institute is thrilled to welcome our newest Fellow, Jaber Hassoun @Jaber_Hassoun! Jaber is a computer science graduate and educational Youtuber focused on science and philosophy communication. His videos and interviews are dedicated to promoting Enlightenment values, progress, philosophical optimism, open society and a critical rational attitude. His is one of the only Arabic-speaking channels that offers deep dives into the Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf and Popperian epistemology in general.

Does Taking Children Seriously imply that parents should let their kids run into the street? ~Conjecture Institute Cofounder @astupple with Advisor @peterboghossian

Ironically, those who say that the non-West hates the West because of the West’s foreign interventions are correct, but not in the way that they typically mean it. Static societies were always fated to be hostile to the West, whether or not the West intervened militarily— merely creating television shows and selling blue jeans would have been enough to put static institutions on the defensive. So, no, Hamas, Putin, Khamenei, and the rest do not hate us because we “slaughtered their families” or “interfered in their territory” or otherwise “aggressed against them”. George W. Bush was nearly correct when he said that “they hate us for our freedom”—they are hostile to us because our freedom- and other progress-fostering institutions mark the extinction of their progress-suppressing way of life unless they do something about it. And they may succeed unless we counteract them. ~Conjecture Institute President @ChipkinLogan

@astupple A latent mathematical genius who happens not to care about algebra may suffer scars from algebra class that they associate with all of math. Therefore, algebra class may have prevented untold mathematical treasures from being discovered.

Also a vast, and strange, case of society-wide amnesia. We know we have forgotten how to solve quadratic equations, and our kids will forget as well, yet we insist they learn it, at a time when we KNOW they will not use it!

Science should be explanatory. Saddling people with non-explanations and contradictions that are hand-waved away as unintuitive or fundamentally incomprehensible is bad, actually. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp

@leoalexart @SP1NS1R @astupple No clue, not my preferred musical genre. It's just a thought experiment.

@ChipkinLogan @SP1NS1R @astupple Does he do that, though? OMD had to take out the guns of one of their songs to play it live for obvious reasons.

.@astupple / “sovereign children” folks: would you let a kid run into traffic, hit someone with a stick repeatedly, or shout “there’s a fire” in a crowded theatre? If not, haven’t we established a willingness to be coercive, so now it’s just about where you draw the line?

Why determinism is compatible with free will: No one can predict your decisions without creating a perfect simulation of you that would itself exercise the free will required to make those decisions. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @maria__violaris

Civilization As a Hard-Won Achievement We take for granted regular elections, personal freedom, jury trial, habeas corpus, gender equality, and uncensored newspapers. We mistakenly think that these are somehow the natural condition of an advanced society, that every country will get there when its people become educated and wealthy enough. History tells a rather different story. You don't have to go back every far to find a time when freedom under the law was confined to the Anglosphere. ~Conjecture Institute Advisor @DanielJHannan at @Heritage

Conjecture Institute's Mission ~Cofounder @astupple with Advisor @peterboghossian

Compulsory rules always set the parent up as an adversary. A social media ban creates a whole new arena of adversarial relationships between kids and the adult world. When you become a gatekeeper, then you become someone that the kid is trying to figure out how to deceive, lie to, get around... ~Conjecture Institute Cofounder @astupple with Advisor @peterboghossian

The growth of knowledge and wealth is necessary if humanity is to keep making progress. And if that’s true, then we should want to accelerate this process—no evil should last a moment longer than it needs to. There is no reason to stop converting the raw materials of the cosmos into resources for our benefit. Quite the contrary. The dead, monotonous universe is there for our making, our happiness, our problem-solving. Greed is not a sin, after all. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani & President @ChipkinLogan

@AP4Liberty Courage means doing something that carries a (social) cost. Tucker going against Trump *after* Trump whacked him costs Tucker nothing.

Tucker Carlson's an anti-libertarian psyop, who shilled for Elizabeth Warren's economic plans, undermined Trump secretly until he became useful to him, shit on libertarians and Ron Paul because of 9/11 Trutherism (until they became useful to him), pitched neoconservative boomerism until it was unpopular, then Keynesianist populism, and now has twisted himself into a deranged isolationist who never saw an American adversary he didn't admire. Donald Trump has taken a bullet for this nation, and been shot at another time. All the evil people in this world hate him and want him dead. His Trump derangement syndrome opponents are demented, or worse. He's been the most libertarian president since Reagan, and maybe even more than Reagan. Everyone wants him dead but MAGA (and Milei and Bibi), and are actively trying to kill him or imprison him and his supporters. The only people who want Tucker dead are his friends in Doha once he's no longer a useful idiot and just a lonely, isolated idiot. That's when the Islamo-Commies who support him will finally drop him off a cliff with the rest of the Code-Pink rainbow brigades.

Mathematics is about explaining the world. Without this layer of meaning, all we have is simply a Library of Babel: it might contain all the truths of the universe, but without the creativity to navigate and understand them, it is ultimately useless. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud

Physical principles serve as guidelines in guessing future laws of physics. Conservation laws are an example, but there are others. ~Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto