Ask A Genius 872: Seth Macfarlane and Mark Wahlberg to Perfectly Defined Deterministic Physics

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/30

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: So, Seth MacFarlane has a new series with Ted, the Talking Teddy Bear. They made two movies with Mark Wahlberg and Ted, the talking teddy bear. Now it’s a TV series, and they had a scene that takes place on Fridays, which is an East Coast ice cream parlour/ restaurant, and it took me back to one of my many missed opportunities. In the late 80s, Adam Sandler took me out to kind of encourage me to write more stuff for him on MTV’s game show Remote Control, and I proceeded not to, but Sandler’s writers have had amazing careers writing well over a dozen movies for him. That’s just one more freaking opportunity that… I probably wouldn’t have been funny enough and talented enough to glom on to, but I don’t think I even tried. I haven’t tried after Kimmel. I’ve been gone from Kimmel for almost ten years and really haven’t tried very hard. I went out a little bit early on, and Carol and I have pitched things occasionally to people we know on TV, and my late brother and I pitched stuff but never with the balls-out aggression that you need to get anywhere with stuff. I’ve been working on this book for way too long, and I’ve always been working on a book without actually ever finishing a book. In physics, I’ve got a theory without really pushing to get the theory recognized or mathematized. So yeah, I regret that I have a few Sinatra lyrics. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you consider your most significant regret? 

Rosner: Probably the physics, but some of this can be rectified if I get the book sold and hide enough physics in the book. However, getting the book sold would heal a lot of my regrets. I mean, I have a lot of stuff not to regret. Having been a decent family man, I guess, is a thing and a good earner when I was earning and a good money manager when I wasn’t bringing in a wage and just not a fucking prick, but you can weigh those things in opposite hands, but I still have time, I just have to use the time I have. I don’t want to jinx myself by saying I still have time, so maybe I don’t have time. I’d like to have time, and I’d still like to redeem myself. Fear was probably a lot of this shit. Maybe fear, maybe not believing in myself strongly enough. 

We’ve talked about the Dunning-Kruger effect, where when people are sufficiently stupid, they believe they’re smart because they’re too stupid to know they’re stupid. There’s probably a reverse Dunning-Kruger where when you’re really smart, you’re overly cognizant of your limitations so that your impression of your talents might be less than someone who’s just a little stupider than you. The people who came up with Dunning-Kruger did not put that on their graph, so I don’t know if it’s a thing. It’s probably not uniformly a thing across smart people or super high IQ people because we know there have been a lot of dickheads, and you know I’m kind of a dickhead, but like, I’m not a wildly modest dickhead. Keith Raniere built a whole… that’s another question: does Keith Raniere believe his bullshit? What do you think?

Jacobsen: Keith? He believes in himself.

Rosner: Yeah, so does he believe he’s one of the smartest people on earth and that he’s come up with a way of being that can fix people and heal people?

Jacobsen: Over time, he probably believes a little bit of his own nonsense.

Rosner: So, can we draw any generalities about super high IQ people like Langan, I think believes that he’s every bit as smart as he claims to be, right?

Jacobsen: It’s probably true.

Rosner: Who else is there? Marilyn Savant is in the same very high IQ boat, and from what I’ve seen, she seems to have a very pragmatic idea of herself. I mean, she’s a black box; she doesn’t talk very much, she doesn’t give many interviews, but she seems to have seized her opportunities and built a nice life for herself absent of grandiosity, right?

Jacobsen: Yeah, she doesn’t seem very grandiose at all; her husband doesn’t seem either. There might have been a little bit of an issue with getting some money from a drug company, but I think that might have been a little bit questionable.

Rosner: Like what? Did Jarvik take some money to endorse some product? Mostly, Jarvik and she was kind of in the background maybe, I don’t know if I’m remembering that right.  

Jacobsen: It was a Lipitor endorsement.

Rosner: Oh. Did she do it or did Jarvik do it? I feel like her husband did it.

Jacobsen: Jarvik did it, yet she helped with that heart company while at the same time helping with that artificial heart company, it doesn’t really implicate her while being in that relationship. I’m sure that was a conversation. So, it really becomes an issue about being a medical doctor and endorsing pharmaceutical company. 

Rosner: So, that doesn’t reflect on her feelings of competence or not.

Jacobsen: No, there has been at least one court case. I don’t recall the specifics, but I do recall seeing that document.

Rosner: Did somebody over the Lipitor?

Jacobsen: No, it was about Marilyn and something else.

Rosner: She just doesn’t seem like to be much of a jackass, really.

Jacobsen: No, she’s very balanced and a normal human being. Langan is unbalanced in general. You’re obsessive and have become balanced only in level of the fact of having a family and being lazier. Keith is not balanced at all but has a a rationale and a sort of consistency to target something immoral and then to go after it by a moral means. Richard May; he’s different. He’s funny, he’s witty, and he is emotionally sensitive and astute.

Rosner: Chris Cole is super competent and probably super realistic about everybody’s skills and motivations. So, out of all the people we’ve talked about, you can’t make a case for reverse Dunning-Kruger because it’s a whole assortment, right?

Jacobsen: That’s true. You get the general maxim of which I’ve probably invented or adhered to after doing all these interviews. IQ, in so far as it measures some form of general intelligence, it acts as an amplifier of whatever personality structure the person has in the first place. So, if they’re a little bit grandiose, it can be amplified. If they’re normal, it makes them super normal. 

Rosner: So, it kind of gives you a lever to become more fully…

Jacobsen: Accelerators; it’s a gas pedal.

Rosner: Okay, that makes sense. And then, if you look at the great brains of history like Newton, a fucking prick, probably pretty convinced of his own talents. Einstein was fairly modest, though also kind of a showman, like a cultivator of his own image. As a very smart person, he probably realized that modesty would be helpful. Plus, he was probably also maybe naturally modest, but it’s hard to divide the two. Feynman; flamboyant but self-effacing. He liked to have a good time; he liked to get laid; he played the bongo drums, and he broke into safes at Los Alamos while they were working on the bomb because he liked the puzzle of figuring out he could figure out how safes work just by thinking about it and then he’d develop a mental picture of the inside of the safe and use that to crack the safe and then he’d leave notes for people in the safe saying I was here. But he said that he wasn’t particularly smart. He had a very average IQ, and he just liked thinking about stuff. 

Either Crick or Watson, the DNA guys, has been very vocal about his very average IQ. So, there is this modesty that may or may not be true modesty. So, maybe the most talented people just say fuck it to doubts and just plow onward.

Jacobsen: There are other factors that act as amplifiers in different directions. You need a very rare combination sustained over a long period of time to make any discovery that has any substance. For the most part you can get a lot of people with a sufficiently high IQ but you don’t have the right personality structure, you don’t have the right environment, you don’t have the right bio genetic social environment to really bringing that about in people who simply through one measurement are shown as intelligent. 

Rosner: Darwin is probably one of the greatest examples of opportunity, which means talent and doggedness. He had analytic skills, and he had doggedness because he worked on his theory for decades until his friends told him to publish Already About to Get Scooped. He had a 5-year trip around the world that gave him the experience and the exposure to what the world and its geography and its animals looked like to come up with the most persuasive presentation of the theory of evolution. What I think is the craziest thing is that he knew more about the sun, or he knew that we didn’t know jack shit about the sun when nobody else did, which I just find crazy that in the, say, the 1870s or 1880s people were theorizing, all the greatest physicists in the world were coming up with theories of what made the sunshine and Darwin of anybody knew that all the theories were wrong because he’d seen the geography of the world and he’d seen the animals of the world and realized that the processes that formed animals and the landscape would take many hundreds and maybe billions of millions and maybe billions of years to play out and none of the theories of how the sun worked had the sun being able to shine for more than like 50 million years.

Jacobsen: Got me thinking; I mean, there might be a way to calculate the average amount of time it takes for one person over the last 2,000 years of recorded history to form a thought. I mean, if it takes an average person out of that 100 billion or so people to form a thought, then you can calculate that over the average lifespan over those 2,000 years. So, not the 80 years you might get in an advanced industrial economy now or the 38 you might get in Industrial Revolution England, but the average over that arc of a couple of millennia is based on the best data we have as an estimate. If you take that average lifespan time by the number of estimated people and then times that by the number of thoughts, you might get in an arbitrary moment of time, like a year or over that lifetime. So, lifetime plus lifetime multiplied by the number of people…

Rosner: Not lifetime because, but say 30 years.

Jacobsen: That’s also a good point.

Rosner: Because your kid years might not be productive for thoughts, yeah, we can do the calculation. So, what? About 110 billion people who’ve ever lived, say, 30 years on average, which is being generous of being competent to think thoughts, and then when you call, you’d have to define what a thought is because I have thoughts like three a second just responding to the environment. What you’re talking about is novel creative thoughts.

Jacobsen: Let’s do the first calculation, then we can do the second calculation. The first calculation simply aims to find out how many thoughts have been thought of of any kind.

Rosner: Do you want to do three a second for every…? 

Jacobsen: So, for those good 30 years, how many thoughts if it’s three thoughts a second?

Rosner: All right. So, that’s 10,000 thoughts an hour times say 16 and let’s say just to make it an even-ish number; that’s 150,000 thoughts a day. So, that’s 50 million thoughts a year roughly times 30 years is one and a half billion thoughts in an average person’s lifespan.

Jacobsen: What’s that over the 110 billion who have ever existed?

Rosner: So, 10 to the 12th times 10 to the 14th thoughts. So, roughly 10 to the 26th thoughts were thought by humans across all of human history.

Jacobsen: So, with that in mind, how many quality thoughts are required to come up with a novel invention, not just a realization like an apple on the head, Newton? I mean an actual invention over the arc of time or Newton in a cave over a couple of months to come up with Calculus.

Rosner: All right, so all you have to do to do the math on that is roughly estimate how many great thoughts there have been throughout history, but I mean, the key is in the 10 to the 26th and not the number of great thoughts because you could be really selective and say 30 great thoughts and come up with some list if you’re a historian or even ten great thoughts or you can be more inclusive and say a thousand or 10,000, but regardless how big that list is you’ve still got a number that when you divide the number of great thoughts into the number of all thoughts, it still takes more than 10 to the 20th thoughts to come up with one that is going to be historically great, right?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: I may have fucked up the math. I may have fucked up a power of 10 or might be off by a thousand. If I did it on paper instead of winging it, but it’s still a shit ton of thoughts. A billion and a half thoughts sound like about the right number of thoughts for somebody to have over an average shortish lifespan, and we’re assuming that of the 110,000 humans who’ve ever lived, they’ve all been in circumstances that were amenable to thought. Also, that estimate is reasonable, and I think it is because it’s been developed by people who knew what they were doing, and most of those humans, I think, probably lived during a time when humans had speech. So, let’s say humans have had a speech for, I don’t know, probably somebody can guess, but actual language for 15,000 years, maybe. But humans have been around for 100,00 years or so. That 110 billion; I don’t know how far back that extends, but for most of the timeline of humans on earth, there have been relatively, especially compared to now, few humans. 

So, I would think that most of the humans who have ever lived have lived during the language period because you could make the case that if you live before a language, then your ability to formulate great thoughts is severely hampered. So, maybe cut the number of humans who can think great thoughts and have, which still doesn’t make your number a whole lot smaller; it’s still of thoughts. It’s still more than 10 to the 25th. So, there’s just a shit ton of thoughts that are just regular people experiencing their lives and coming to some conclusions but not just these conclusions that change the world. 

Jacobsen: So, a truly world-changing idea only comes about once every how many 100 million people?

Rosner: Well, again, you got to divide, say, 60 billion people who lived at a time when there was language and how many world-changing thoughts? If you want to go with just ten great thoughts in all of history, which seems like way too selective, that means one in every six billion people, but that’s not really the way thoughts work or the way great thoughts work. A great thought is maybe just a light bulb going off, and it might be like a moment of insight like Newton and the Apple, which is apocryphal anyway, or it might be like Mendeleev, the periodic table guy, coming up with the idea that the elements could be arranged in a table based on their shared chemical properties which is a semi great thought. It was a big deal, but it wasn’t one of the biggest deals. And like Democritus decided that matter came in the form of atoms, in these smallest indivisible parts, and that was a good thought but useless because it would be another 2,000 years or so; I don’t know when he lived exactly before we had the science to confirm that kind of general idea that at some point matter is indivisible.

Jacobsen: When did we toss out the idea of matter as a thing and that there was a time of a “mechanical philosophy?” It was dominant; it was around, people adhered to it, and it slowly gave way. Was it around the discovery of quantum theory?

Rosner: Yeah. You mean what? The matter is just being this billiard ball clockwork universe. Is that what you’re talking about?

Jacobsen: Yes. 

Rosner: Well, yeah, there’s no doubt that quantum mechanics wrecked that idea of the universe, and it took a while, but I mean, without quantum mechanics, it would be hard for that picture of the universe to have been overthrown. All the phenomena that contradict the precisely defined clockwork billiard ball universe are quantum phenomena. So, yeah, all happened right at the turn of the 20th century, and it took 20 years or more to percolate through all the scientists because it was such a distressing picture of the world compared to the perfectly defined deterministic physics that came before. 

Jacobsen: If you have a universe characterized by matter in some models, those models still have utility. It’s not like they just throw them away.

Rosner: Right, but when you say matter, it doesn’t really define what matter is. Like, saying that matter is information as defined by quantum mechanics at least defines what matter is by stripping away all characteristics other than its mathematical properties, right?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: So, when you talk about matter, you’re talking about matter as stuff like little wads of stuff. I think people’s 19thcentury imaginations had physical properties like hardness and spatial extent, and at some point, you have to go back to Democritus and say that like a similar idea when you strip matter down to its smallest components, is it even going to be able to have all but the most basic characteristics and what are those basic characteristics and turns out those basic characteristics are those that are laid out by quantum mechanics. So, the idea of matter is being like this very existent physical material stuff like clay or chalk or something that has a very concrete existence that the concrete hardness of matter has been stripped away at the same time. Matter does have a very concrete mathematical existence. It’s very well-defined now. So, yeah, the idea of matter being little balls bouncing off each other precisely has been replaced by a theory that is even more precise but frustrating because it’s probabilistic and the matter is fuzzy.

So, it’s not that the idea of matter was wiped away; it’s the idea of matter as being precisely defined that was swept away. I mean, precisely existing within space and time was wiped away. Matter is precisely defined according to quantum mechanics, but that precise definition is a definition of fuzzy ass matter. So, precision was wiped away, and determinism was wiped away, and yeah, quantum mechanics did it. The phenomena that led to quantum mechanics, you could argue that, that that did it. That started knocking it down when you had experiments that showed that light could be seen as both particle and wave depending on how it was observed; that started with the idea of precise clockwork matter. I think a fully developed quantum theory came along and totally kicked precision’s ass between the first experiments that made the matter seem fuzzy and quantum mechanics was probably 20, or 30 years. So, that was probably not enough time for these weird experimental results to dethrone the clockwork universe.

So, it was probably the very precise and successful quantum theories themselves that really kicked precision’s ass, clockwork ass where, if people hadn’t come up with complete quantum theories. I’m saying stuff that’s not worth much at this point. 

Jacobsen: What was the original question?

Rosner: You asked something like when the idea of precise clockwork determinist predetermined matter went away.

Jacobsen: No, I mean before that. We were talking about calculating the number of thoughts for all over time. Once human intelligence we’llis deconstructed, possibly create something that is not necessarily an entity but a computational engine that has those quality of thoughts and that number of thoughts in less than an hour.

Rosner: What you’re saying is the big data processing technology of the future will just generate a shit ton of thoughts in a really brief amount of time and probably increasingly sophisticated thoughts, right? That’s what you’re saying.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: It’s similar to somebody with a smartphone. That smartphone probably does more information processing, more Tera flips in an hour than all the people and machinery doing calculations and all the time up through when humans landed on the moon, right? Something like that or at least more calculations in an hour than all the calculations done by everybody in World War II. So, the amount of of thinking that will be going on 20 years from now when AI is truly capable of thinking either in concert with people or on its own, the amount of thinking going on on earth will have multiplied tenfold 20 years from now and a billionfold 50 years from now. Something like that? 

Jacobsen: It’s going to be a different type of world. It might not be that different structurally like a lot of the core of the world and the surface of the world will be much the same but the world of thought, the world of information processing whether in human styles or other styles will be much much different.

Rosner: What happens with the number of great thoughts that get thought; world-changing thoughts?

Jacobsen: The bar rises.

Rosner: So, we’ve talked about Feynman’s three paths of science. In the ’60s, he wrote one of his little lectures, kind of a non-scientific lecture because he did a lot of lectures that were heavy physics, but this was more a metaphysic. He said that science in the future will be completed and will understand everything there is to understand, or the universe is fundamentally unknowable, or we make just steady progress and continue to discover things. So, either you finish science because science is completable, or it’s fundamentally unknowable, or the universe is such that you can continue to find out new things about it. You can ask the same question about great discoveries as we move into the era of big information processing. Is there a limited number of great discoveries to be made about the world? Either there is or there isn’t, and either situation is going to be surprising. I’m guessing the answer is kind of like Feynman’s middle ground, which is that we’ll continue to discover new stuff. Any thoughts?

Jacobsen: Not at the moment. I think that should be good for tonight. Thank you very much for your time tonight. That was a wonderful session.

[Recording End]

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