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Alan Watts says that worry is an endlessly peeled onion.
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Girard sees human desires as constituted by really two strands.
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Physical desire, a desire for the object itself, as well as metaphysical desire.
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The desire for what that object says about me.
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He basically says, you know, Girard is a one size fits all.
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Girard's answer is that we desire to exist very loosely in great measure. We want to be cool.
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It's in our base code as humans to first fit in to the tribe, but then Storr adds, after you fit in, what you want to do is stand out. So people are into it.
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For it's own sake, or mimetic theory has no value, and people are interested only because other people are interested in it, which is exactly what Mimetic theory says.
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Apocalyptic pessimism is not my brand of tea.
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Innovation is nothing but a minimal respect of the past and a mastery of its achievements.
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I've always said pessimists sound smart, and optimists make money.
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The cat is already jumping out of the box and there's no way to get it back in.
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Johnathan Bi — René Girard and the Philosophy of Innovation Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops.
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One of the things I love about Infinite Loops is that I get to have people on who have a very specific and yet very deep domain knowledge about a particular subject that I am interested in.
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And that subject today is the philosophy of René Girard, Mimetic Theory.
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My friend Johnathan Bi, who has done a series of lectures.
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Spoiler alert, I got to watch some of them and you can't. Actually, you can.
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We're going to talk about that. Johnathan, welcome.
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Johnathan Bi: Thanks for having me.
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Before we begin, I thoroughly enjoyed our first lecture.
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You recited a poem that I liked so much that I've been reciting it.
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So I think it was, let me try here.
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"Fill the South Sea goblet full/The gods to our stock give care/Europa pleased accepts the Bull/And Jove with joy puts away the Bear."
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I love [inaudible] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bingo.
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Johnathan Bi: There you go.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fantastic. Fantastic.
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Well, I think we are post people writing poetry about startups and meme stocks, right?
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Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're out of the peak. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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The cyclic nature is very, very interesting to me.
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So let's dive right in, because as I said to you before we started to record, the prep time for you in particular...
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This is a compliment, so take it as one.
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Is enormous because your lectures are fascinating.
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So I love watching those.
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But then as you know, I am a rabbit hole jumper and so lecture fantastic, but then Jim has to, he can't help himself, go down the rabbit hole.
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So we're going to, I think, come up with some interesting takes on what we're going to discuss today.
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But the title of the lecture that we're going to talk about mostly today was Prestige.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And in its original Latin as David, your conversant points out, this is what six years of Latin got me, I know the origins of words, was in the original Latin, it actually meant conjuring tricks.
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As in a magician, prestidigitation.
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Later Latin, it meant illusion.
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But then I love when it changes to French, it means illusion, but glamor.
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So if you would, please set the stage for us on the whole Girardian notion of prestige, why we seek it, etc.
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, like you did in the lecture that other people haven't had a chance to see yet.
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Johnathan Bi: Well, hey, that's already more than knowing ancient Chinese has given me, cause at least you can connect English words to their roots, whereas there's no connection with ancient Chinese.
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Although I have translated my own Buddha Sutras from ancient Chinese to English for the start of my manuscripts. There's that. I digress. Yeah.
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So I think where we need to start off is maybe just a brief reminder of what we talked about last podcast discussion, we'll be very quick, is that Girard sees human desires as constituted by really two strands.
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Physical desire, a desire for the object itself or what the object can bring us, the experience of the object, as well as metaphysical desire.
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The desire for what that object says about me.
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Johnathan Bi: So a few examples, very quick.
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If I desire sex, it could be out of physical desire, that would be for intimacy or the pleasure.
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Or it could be metaphysical desire, what having sex with a certain type of person says about me. Right?
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And this is the psychology of the Don Juan or the coquette.
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When I choose a car, it could be for the gas mileage, for how comfortable the seat is to sit in, whether there's a massage in the seat, or it could be what driving a Rolls Royce around says about me.
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Not always positive by the way.
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Johnathan Bi: The next step that Girard goes, after delineating these two species of desire, is what do we really desire to be?
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And Girard's answer is that we desire to exist very loosely in great measure.
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We want to be cool, to put it in very colloquial terms. But how do we know that?
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And this is where the mimetic part of it really comes in.
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Girard's hypothesis is that we desire objects associated with models, to people of superior being, whom we already look up to. Right?
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Johnathan Bi: So this could be a sports star, a celebrity, or even more mundane, just a coworker who has been doing really well in the company.
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Or maybe in old times it was a priest or a divine figure, or could be even a fictional hero like Achilles.
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And Girard's intuition is that we tend to take on the desires that they take on with the false assumption being that those objects which they desire are what grant that addition in being.
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And so you can already see if we were to define prestige, and I think this is a totally reasonable way to define it, as desiring the object for more than what it can bring us. Right?
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There's almost even when we say today that Harvard is prestigious, it's almost a half critique because you're saying it doesn't fully warrant, the object itself doesn't fully warrant, that desire.
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Johnathan Bi: Girard would say that's where the other part of the desire comes from, the prestige part of desire.
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It comes from the associations with the superior models.
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So Girard always sees the human subject as never desiring alone, but always desiring among a community of other desires.
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And the overlay, if you will, the alpha over the sort of object beta, if you will, to put it into financial terms, that is the sort of mechanism, that of prestige that Girard identifies.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is fascinating.
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I immediately thought of the George Box quote or maxim that "all models are wrong and some are useful."
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And that's kind of the way I approach life.
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I got very interested in mimetic theory a long time ago before the craze, which I wonder must be mimetically driven.
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And I remember saying it to people, and they would kind of look at me.
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And half of my respondents would say things like, "Well, yeah, that makes total sense."
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And the other half would say, "Oh, that's absurd. I don't think like that. What proof is there?"
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it makes me think of something that you said in the second lecture where it was, and I think you might have been paraphrasing Girard himself, where he says, or you said, "Grant me this one hypothesis." Right?
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And that was at the beginning.
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To me, my mind immediately went to planted axiom.
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And you what a planted axiom is.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, okay.
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So a planted axiom in logic is the assumption, or the assertion rather, that a point that you are trying to make is true.
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It is asserted as true even though no proof is given as to its accuracy or there's no empirical proof, etc. , etc. Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: If you take logic, which I did, one of the first things you learn about is the planted axiom, because they'll say, "This is applicable in many...
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It's not just logic, it's applicable across many human endeavors."
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Where someone basically slips one in on you and then the rest falls into place.
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So talk a bit about that.
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I mean, there is some interesting thing.
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I always default to, "I wonder if evolution has anything to say on this?"
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Or at least my interpretation of it.
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And we have mirror neurons and those make sense.
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But anyway, talk about asking for relief with your first hypothesis seems to me to be special pleading.
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Johnathan Bi: Yeah, well that's quite interesting, right?
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Because it's almost this, you're making a Cartesian allowance for oneself of you're just giving me this one thing, whereas Descartes is trying to find that one thing that he can lean on, so to speak.
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But before I go there, I want to bring up a interesting thing that you discussed about the interest in mimetic theory being a mimetic craze itself.
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And I think that's right, but unfortunately, I think it put its detractors in a very difficult situation.
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Johnathan Bi: There are some comments on some of the podcasts I've been making, which is like, "Oh, people are just into mimetic theory these days because it's popular."
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And I'm like, "But that is precisely what mimetic theory... It tells people."
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So either mimetic theory does have value because it's right, and so people are into it for its own sake, or mimetic theory has no value, and people are interested only because other people are interested in it, which is exactly what mimetic theory says.
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Johnathan Bi: So anyways, obviously there's ways to strengthen that critique.
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I was jesting a bit there, but just thought I'd, as a logician myself, I thought I'd also highlight that sort of interesting incongruence.
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Now to answer your question directly, so that quote I believe is from the first lecture.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Nope, nope, nope.
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I just watched it last night. Second lecture.
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Johnathan Bi: Okay, correct me. Great. Okay.
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But I do remember the context.
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The context is David, my interlocutor in the lecture, asks me, "What proof is there for mimesis?"
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And I believe I said, from a STEM background as I was, and most intelligent people are trained these days, my exhortation to him was to expand the type or species of evidence that he is willing to take in.
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Because if it's just this sort of scientific evidence, do an experiment that's all verifiable, falsifiable, then you're not going to get at most of the important truths in the world.
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Johnathan Bi: Now I'll tell you what kind of evidence Girard provides us.
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But first, I think what Girard...
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There are empirical, scientific evidence for mimesis.
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I don't think it's super well developed, but I think it's a very fruitful path to explore.
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There are mirror neurons, for example, neurons that both fire when you observe an action, also when you're performing the same action.
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It also exists in monkeys, as well.
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And also, there's been copious amount of studies about how imitation seems to be almost a natural, evolutionary intuition of mankind, where babies, when they're born just a few hours, they start imitating the experimenter's facial expressions.
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But obviously, Girard's arguments do not proceed in such a way.
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Let's do an experiment on this society, let's see if they kill anyone, and let's see if they assign any undeserved blame.
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Most of Girard's proof, and I think much ...
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There's a great species of philosophical proof that is what I call a hermeneutical proof, and it goes something like this.
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Grant me this one axiom, this one, planted axiom. Is that right?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Mm-hmm.
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Johnathan Bi: One, planted axiom, and just follow me along here and let me show you what this thing can do, and judge the validity of this axiom by the amount, this whole kaleidoscope of phenomenon, that I am able to make sense to you.
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And so, I'm reading Phenomenology, right now, Hegel, and at least he doesn't directly address why things can't be contradictory because contradiction is how the phenomenology progresses.
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And when I asked my professor this, he was like, "Don't be so difficult, Johnathan.
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Just grant Hegel this one thing and see what he's able to do with this idea of non-contradiction, and then let's ask that question."
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Johnathan Bi: So, I think, and this goes into a whole other conversation, but that science really narrows that the species, and wrongfully so, a species and type of evidence that the modern man is willing to accept, and I think that that's part of why I even had to go into that with David in the first place.
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But I hope that answers it.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: It does.
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Johnathan Bi: Yeah, go ahead. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah, it does.
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It's interesting to me because I have a love/hate relationship with Girard.
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The apocalyptic pessimism is not my brand of tea, and yet, I continue to be fascinated by the theories because there is a lot of use from understanding memetic behavior, etc.
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So, Wittgenstein, I think, don't look for meanings, look for use.
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And so, I keep dipping back into and watching lectures like yours, which are really great, and so, on the one hand, I'm like, there is a lot of use here, right?
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Johnathan Bi: Yeah, right.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: It helps you to understand, in a better, more fulsome way, human behavior, what drives us.
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It's more than adjacent to the idea of status seeking.
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I had Will Storr, the author of ‘The Status Game’, on, and in my mind, they kind of blend together.
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And one of the things that he maintains is that it's in our base code, as humans, to first fit into the tribe because, if you don't fit into the tribe, they excommunicate you or exile you.
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And in the days of hunter/gatherer, you were dead, basically.
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To be exiled was a death sentence, so it really fits with just the whole evolution of how society evolved itself. Fit in, right?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, in other words, the only way to fit in is to watch what everyone else is doing to mimic them, and thus, the mirror neurons and everything else.
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But then Storr adds, which I also find true, is after you fit in, what you want to do is stand out, which is an interesting phenomenon to me.
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And it seems to be quite universal.
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What have you, in all of your various studies, etc, that are not necessarily obviously adjacent to Girardian memetic theory, but which you find yourself, because of your deep domain knowledge on Girard and memetic theory, saying, "Oh."
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Johnathan Bi: Right, right. There's so much.
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There's Soros's, who I've been meaning to explore more, theory of reflexivity, ‘The Alchemy of Finance.
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’ One way to read Girard, a fascinating way, is an attack on economic thinking, and maybe we can go into that.
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There's a line of thinkers called the recognition theorists that I'm happy to elaborate upon.
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I find a deep synergy with Buddhism.
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In fact, how I got into Girard, in the first place, was I was trying to resolve some personal struggles, and I found it was the Girard and the Buddhists who were most able to speak to that.
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I know you're a Daoist, yourself.
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And I actually ended up writing a 50,000-word manuscript, it's been abandoned unfortunately, about these two interfaith dialogues.
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And I hope to have connected them in quite a deep way, even though that connection is not complete.
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Johnathan Bi: But let me make a comment, if it's okay, before I dive into any of those, about this idea of status seeking.
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And I would say that, much like, and I'm going to butcher this because I'm not a physicist, Einstein was able to describe classical physics, but also expand the domain of it.
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Again, tell me if that's right.
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I know that's my intuition.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's correct. Yeah.
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Johnathan Bi: I would argue memetic theory actually goes deeper than this mere status signaling, while being able to explain all the interesting parts of this type of outlook.
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But let me explain first why it goes deeper.
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This idea of status seeking, in some sense, still models people as these individuals.
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Now individuals, granted, who want the approval of others, but individuals, nonetheless, who are able to come up with their own desires, even though there's an overlay of social desires beyond.
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But what Girard is saying is that normative certainty, itself ...
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Okay, so I'm using a perennial distinction here, for our listeners, between normative and descriptive.
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Johnathan Bi: Descriptive, the color of my turtleneck, the length of my hand, anything they can measure, so to speak, or you can observe.
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Normative, what is the good? What did I do? What is the beautiful? Axiology, values.
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Girard would say the strongest authority that determines normative value is other people, and the model you get, no longer as individuals, who merely seek the approval of others, but individuals who inter-penetrate each other, that I am not a fully-formed individual without ...
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That all of my friends' desires are not just external things that I desire, but are deep within me, that make up myself.
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Or to put more provocatively, as Girard would say, there is no individual.
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And this is really a cataclysmic and revolutionary, in a good and bad, but mostly a terrifying sense, of a moral framework to build a social theory off of.
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Johnathan Bi: Because what does modernity think normative value derives from?
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I would say there's largely two answers here.
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One answer is reason, and that's the Enlightenment.
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And that's why we have Mill, that's why we have elections, that the individual can, through his or her own power, reason what is a good without the interference of others.
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The other, I would say, is Romanticism, our intuitions, our deep sense feeling.
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And this is the crux of the LGBTQ movement, right?
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How does that five-year-old boy over there know that she's really a girl?
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Because she really intuits, and only she has access to that subjectivity.
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Girard says nay to both fronts.
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Our intuitions can be just as influenced socially by media, by other forces, by other people, and our reason does not stand alone either.
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Our reason pretends, in a Platonic way, to guide the reins of spirit and appetite, but is often the spokesperson.
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Johnathan Bi: We often determine our stances through tribalistic forces, and reason becomes a defensive lawyer, a spokesperson.
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So, this is a very fundamental attack on the foundations of Western, modern political theory, even though it may appear innocuous, because it fundamentally destroys the most important, I would say, social-political conception, social-political-ontological foundation of the modern West, which is the individual.
18:03
Now, you can take this in either direction. It could be progressive.
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This is also a Marxist-Hegelian critique, or you can take it reactionary, a Nietzschean critique.
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But it is fundamentally against modern philosophical-political assumptions. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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And that is one of the things that I both find interesting, but also just give a shrug to, because I like the modern world.
18:29
I like elections and agency and all of those things, but I was also reading Gabriel Tarde, who I'm sure you're familiar with.
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Johnathan Bi: No, no, no.
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You'll have to enlighten me again. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
18:40
Gabriel Tarde was a predecessor to Girard, who basically came up with very, very similar ideas.
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In his book, ‘The Laws of Imitation’, which was published in 1890, so ahead of Girard, he makes the claim that I want to get your read on.
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He says it's basically the laws of imitation follow three things.
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The first is innovation.
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Now, he maintains, in the book, that true innovators in society are about 1%, and that is a fairly constant in his estimation.
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I don't know that I agree, but I'm just telling you what he said, back in 1890.
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And that innovation, the 1% causes others, who are not innovators, to copy them, and thus, you get trend-setting, thus you get the new, new thing, all of that type of thing.
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And then he says, in the book, that it ultimately falls into opposition, which grows from disparate places, disparate philosophies, etc, and then rinse and repeat.
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And then, as you continue to read him, and then you see other people like René Pommier.
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Are you familiar with him? Johnathan Bi: Mm-mm. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
20:01
So, he basically- Johnathan Bi: Take me to school.
20:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Like I said, rabbit holes, man.
20:07
Johnathan Bi: Rabbit holes.
20:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I just dive down them.
20:09
And by the way, and I'm sure you know this, there's a lot of really interesting and similar ideas expressed by Spinoza, Hobbes, de Tocqueville et al.
20:16
But let's stay with René Pommier for a moment.
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And he asked three questions, and he's more specifically speaking to Girard, whereas Tarde didn't know about Girard because he was a predecessor of his.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, the first one that I'd like you to think about and answer is Pommier basically says, "Yes, this is a fascinating theory.
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However, how does he explain taboo desires?"
20:46
You mentioned the various sexuality groups that are now emergent, and his specific question, though, goes to probably pre-internet, pre-ability for us to see, socially ... How does he describe?
21:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, for a pre-social media gay kid, for example, with very conservative parents, and yet he still has that desire, and implicit, at least my read of Palmier, is he's implying there isn't any mediator that he is modeling himself on.
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The second thing he says is every potential situation has dozens, many times more mediators, and it is up to the individual, who you just asserted under Girardian theory doesn't exist, to use his agency to choose a mediator. Johnathan Bi: Right. Yeah, yeah. That's very good.
21:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then, the final one is, which we've already hit on, catty honestly from ... And this isn't me. I'm quoting here's.
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He basically says Girard is a one-size-fits-all.
21:56
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, he's a hedgehog. He's a hedgehog.
22:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, he's a hedgehog. So what do you think?
22:01
I know I dropped a lot on you there, but [inaudible].
22:04
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this is fascinating. This is fascinating. Okay, few things.
22:05
The first thing I'll say is, I don't want to paint Girard as a political radical, in either hyper-progressive or hyper-reactionary, although I think he does have both instincts.
22:16
He, himself, I think, better describes as apolitical.
22:21
He think it's pointless in some sense, in the end times, to engage in politics.
22:26
But when you really press ...
22:26
And also, let me be clear.
22:26
When I say that his intuitions of normativity are reactionary, progressive against modern, Western, philosophical assumptions, that's not to say he, himself, was against those because those intuitions naturally lend towards progressivism or reactionary movements.
22:42
But there's also a way to smuggle that into the good, old, liberal democracy, and that is what Girard, himself, does.
22:49
Johnathan Bi: When you read some of his lesser-read works, like ‘When These Things Begin’, it's a great book.
22:50
In fact, it's the first one that I recommend to people, when they want a really easy to understand Girard, because it's a conversation, and people are throwing modern topics at him, like victimhood or climate change.
23:03
And he basically says, "Yeah, the liberal democracies are built on, in some sense, a lie, the individual.
23:09
But nonetheless, that's still the best thing that we have to correct our fundamentally social tendencies.
23:15
So, one can still very much rescue liberal democracy, so that's the first thing I'll say in response to that.
23:20
Johnathan Bi: The second thing, and I'm just going to briefly touch upon this.
23:21
Maybe we'll remember it, and we'll open up this Pandora's box later.
23:25
But I've been asked to give a lecture on the philosophy and history of innovation at University of Austin, so I've been preparing, in my free time, for that.
23:34
So, there's a lot we could go into on this idea of innovation and how that it connects to imitation.
23:38
But the long story short, there, as the one-hit-wonder Girard, as you probably can guess, he thinks that innovation and imitation are actually connected in some deep and intricate way.
23:49
But I'll put that as a teaser, out there, because I want to get to your most meaty, hardest to hit, fastball questions.
23:52
The first question was about ...
23:52
It wasn't the taboo desire.
23:52
That's the second question.
23:58
What was the first question again?
23:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That was the second.
23:58
The first one was simply an observation that Gabriel Tarde, in 1890, wrote a book called ‘The Laws of Imitation’, in which he did a three-step process, with rinse and repeat.
24:14
It begins with innovation, which he maintains is a tiny percentage of the population. 1% is what he says.
24:19
I don't agree, but that's what he says.
24:19
He says that, then, the majority in the population or society imitates that innovation, and then that breaks down into opposition to the previously innovative discovery.
24:34
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see. I see.
24:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, the reason I brought him up was simply because I assumed, and perhaps incorrectly, that Girard had probably read Tarde. Johnathan Bi: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
24:50
Girard will actually trace actually a long lineage of people who talk about imitation, including, of course, Plato and Aristotle.
24:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course.
24:57
Johnathan Bi: Girard has his own defense of what he thinks is unique about what he adds, and he thinks everyone has been talking about imitation of things that aren't desire.
25:01
And he specifically focused on memetic desire, acquisitive mimesis.
25:05
I don't know how much I buy that, having read the other authors, but that's his own self-conception.
25:09
But let me address this innovation point because it's a very fascinating one, and I think it's a real big question.
25:13
If Girard thinks that the world is governed by a logic of imitation, how does innovation happen?
25:18
And this is his, Girard's line. I love it so much.
25:23
It's the best one-liner on the concept of innovation, that I remember it to heart.
25:28
Johnathan Bi: “Innovation is nothing but a minimal respect of the past and a mastery of its achievements.
25:29
” And I think we're going to have to unpack this, a little bit, because I think what Girard is doing is warning against two types of ideas that are contra to innovation.
25:41
He is, in summary or as a preview, trying to sail between the Scylla of idolatry and the Charybdis of fashion.
25:46
So, let's talk about the first one.
25:54
Johnathan Bi: Clearly, one view that is antithetical and destructive, and this is quite obvious because we know this, it's in our minds, against innovation is this idea that history has happened already, that our best times are past, and the best thing we can do is to sort of imitate the past.
26:07
This has been attributed to certain Christian thinkers in the Reformation, for example, that innovation had a really bad word.
26:20
Innovation was synonymous with heresy, in the 200 years plus Reformation, because the Catholics were like the Protestants.
26:26
They're innovators, and you get these funny pamphlets that are almost nonsensical to us, where “the king against the innovators” or something like that, because we think innovation is a great thing.
26:36
Johnathan Bi: And what's really funny is that the Protestants then said, "No. F you. You're the innovators.
26:44
The Catholics, you're the real innovators.
26:44
You've added upon this religious form on top of the true, Christian message." Okay?
26:49
So, you see this intuition that what is good is that going back to an origin, the Garden of Eve or Christ's message that we've been expelled from.
26:56
And this, I think, has been probably the dominant, if not the most common, intuition of history that we've had, throughout human history.
27:07
The Confucians, what does Confucius teach us?
27:11
[foreign language] “Restore the rituals of the Zhou. ” It's a looking back.
27:11
So, that is clearly one way to pervert from innovation, and that's why he says minimal respect of the past.
27:23
Johnathan Bi: Okay, so that's one side.
27:24
We don't want to do that.
27:24
The other side, and this is where it gets really interesting and relevant for modernity, is what he calls fashion.
27:28
That is to say, a disrespect for the past.
27:34
You also can't have that.
27:34
You can't just desire the new, the novel for the novel because imitation, replication, mastery is a necessary precondition.
27:42
Think about Goethe, who mastered the classical poetic forms before he pioneered his own.
27:49
Think about each successive, industrial power that was always wrongfully recognized only as a copycat.
27:56
This happened with the English, I believe, with the Germans, or it might have been the other way around, and then happened with America.
28:05
You look at what the continent said about America in the early 20th, 19th century.
28:10
They were like, "The Americans can't take on a world leadership position.
28:10
Those are just pale, industrious imitators."
28:14
The same thing happened with Japan and Korea and China.
28:20
Johnathan Bi: And so Girard's point is that the person who's being copied is so scared and so shocked, when imitators rise to become innovators in their own right, because they've drawn a false dichotomy between these two constants.
28:30
In fact, what you need to do, to truly innovate, is pure mastery.
28:36
Master everything that has come before you, but don't idolize it.
28:42
Don't think that it is the end all, be all.
28:42
And let me give you two examples.
28:47
Johnathan Bi: We tend to think Jack Ma, Alibaba, copying eBay, copycat, and Einstein, general relativity, something completely new, but I would wager that the form of that activity is quite similar.
28:58
Whereas, Jack Ma had to understand exactly how e-commerce was being implemented in the West, not be idolatrous to that, and figure out how to adapt his understanding to a new market, Einstein also had to study classical physics for the good first parts of his life.
29:17
And so, if I were to put it in one line, I'd say something like, no imitation can be done without some innovation because it needs to be adapted, to be adopted.
29:29
Johnathan Bi: And so, Girard actually sees ...
29:35
This is the last comment I'll make.
29:35
In modernity, where innovation has become so proliferated, he actually thinks that, right now, is the pole that we've swung to.
29:41
The reason we're not making big innovations and breakthroughs isn't because we're idolatrous to the past, but because we've actually devalued it too much.
29:51
We've swung too much to the other side of liking novelty for novelty's sake, in the same way a Confucian in Chinese antiquity might have desired tradition for its own sake.
30:00
The movie version of this that always gets me is Marlon Brando, is ‘Wild Ones’, I think, a movie in the 50s where he plays this really cool, rebellious, I think, motorbike gang leader. He's in a bar.
30:11
A cute girl goes up and asks him, "What are you rebelling against?"
30:15
Johnathan Bi: And he smiles with a smug grin, and he says, "What do you got?"
30:17
He doesn't give a damn what you're going to give him.
30:17
He doesn't really stand for anything, other than the antiquarian stands for anything other than a love of the past.
30:27
And so, Girard actually thinks that, in modernity, industry, business is actually much more innovative than the arts, the humanities, because business leaders are more happy to copy, whereas people in the arts and the humanities and philosophy, they all want to do something original.
30:44
And that's the fundamental reason they're not doing anything original. I'll pause there. That's ... Yeah.
30:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Interesting, so several threads there.
30:49
First, on the Confucian quote, I immediately thought of the Lao Tzu verse, where he goes through his reasoning.
30:56
Where natural goodness is lost ...
30:56
I'm bollocksing this up, but it's something along the lines of, “where natural goodness is lost, artifice and ritual replace it.
31:09
” And I'll find the verse, and I'll text it to you or email it to you, because that's immediately what I think of.
31:15
I think of Lao Tzu answering Confucius, there, with saying, "The rituals that you are so desirous of, that's a sign of stasis and decay.
31:21
That is not a sign of a healthy society.
31:29
” Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then, to the other, I would say, I would go all Deutschian on you, David Deutsch, ‘The Beginning of Infinity’, and one of his wonderful observations in his book was what were physicists saying about nuclear power and the internet in 1900?
31:46
Nothing because they didn't exist. Nobody knew about them.
31:54
And Deutsch presses the point, to the point of he repeats it so often that you get a little irritated, but you also understand why he's pressing the point.
32:02
And the point is, one of the blind spots we, as humans, have is that we lack the understanding that we have no way to prognosticate or prophesize future knowledge.
32:17
And thus, his example of physicists in 1900 not knowing anything or having any opinion on the internet or nuclear power because we lack the ability to prophesize what new innovations, back to innovations, and new knowledge will occur, so that leads often to you'll see societies in stasis.
32:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then, my final thing is a question, again, to you, which is, did Girard miss inflection points?
32:50
And by that, I mean I was thinking about ... You bring up Plato.
32:58
I, like you, have had my Plato period and my Aristotle period, and I love Plato's example of the reason and emotion, the two horses, the charioteer with the two horses.
33:12
And we always update our metaphors and analogies to whatever's current, so now we talk about computers and- Johnathan Bi: Before it was watches and steamboats, for a while. Yeah.
33:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, exactly right.
33:24
Whatever was the new things.
33:24
But back to Girard and just thinking about the ancient Greeks.
33:24
So, the ancient Greek arete, excellence, dominated the society of Greek nobles and others and produced a certain type of person that was very different than, say, the UK, we're talking about the age of Enlightenment, after the founding of the Royal Society, whose motto, as you know, was “Nullius in verba”, take no one's word for it. Johnathan Bi: Yes. Yes, yes. Right, right.
33:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, what do you think?
33:58
Johnathan Bi: What do I think?
34:00
That's a good question, if there ever were one.
34:00
I think you threw me another softball.
34:05
I want to get to the critiques of Girard because those are a bit more difficult to deal with.
34:11
As I said, I've been studying the intellectual history of innovation in my spare time, ever since I got the invitation to lecture on it.
34:15
And as I mentioned before, I think you can basically break up humanity's intuitions of innovation into, I would say, largely three periods.
34:28
We can try to break 3000 years into three period.
34:28
It's getting muffy, but here it goes.
34:34
All the way from Xenophon, who's one of the first, at least recorded, to use the Greek phrase, ‘καινοτομία’, ‘καινός’ means new and ‘τομη’ I think he means to cut.
34:44
He's proposing a new way for people to do mines.
34:44
So, that was an innovation, it was a technical innovation all the way to the Latin authors.
34:49
And then you have the reformation as well as the republic period, that form innovation in a way.
34:56
And then you have our modern industrial period.
35:00
Johnathan Bi: So, let me just give you a super brief overview.
35:02
In this, we'll call it the in antiquity, the dominant view of innovation was that it was bad, that it probably shouldn't be done.
35:10
It was probably unavoidable.
35:10
This is why in Plato's [inaudible], his perfect aristocratic society, he still gives you a degeneration of states.
35:19
Aristocracy, degenerates into timocracy, or the rule of honorable the military men, degenerate an oligopoly, the rule of the rich, degenerates into, God forbid, democracy, generates eventually into tyranny.
35:34
Johnathan Bi: And you find Aristotle warning against a similar thing.
35:36
You get this idea that much like a spendthrift, innovation was something almost evil that snuggled in innocuously until your entire state has been changed.
35:41
What's really funny is the Romans, or many of them, had a positive view of innovation. Is it [Latin]?
35:47
I think that's the Latin word, I'll have go back and- Jim O'Shaughnessy: De novo.
35:55
Johnathan Bi: Right, yeah, yeah, perhaps.
35:57
And what's really funny however, is once you pull their understanding of innovation apart, it's actually a negative view because that word meant a return.
36:04
It meant a rejuvenation, a recovery.
36:11
So, when they were translating part of the Bible into Latin, what was translated into the Latin phrase for innovation was things like God taking the chosen people back into the promised land.
36:22
So it was introducing something new, but it was rescuing ...
36:26
It was a renaissance, it was rescuing something old and then rejuvenating society with that.
36:32
Johnathan Bi: So, as you can tell, they're still not really positive about this idea of innovation.
36:33
And most of the innovation in this antiquity, period of antiquity, was political social innovation.
36:38
You have Xenophon, and technical innovations of improving minds, and how to organize slaves to better open new minds.
36:48
But most of it was political. That's the first period.
36:48
I would categorize it as not many people are caring about innovation, but it's mostly bad and you probably shouldn't do it.
36:57
Break glass in case of emergency.
36:57
Johnathan Bi: And the second period of English ...
37:01
I'm sorry, of the Protestant reformation, as we discussed already, gave innovation a really, really bad term.
37:07
So, calling someone an innovator was almost then, it was almost as bad as calling someone a racist today.
37:13
And what made this even worse was the failed attempts at Republicanism in England.
37:17
And so, innovation took upon what was added to this theological connotation of heresy from the Reformation and the Protestants and the Catholics accusing each other of innovation.
37:30
There was added this additional political charge of a revolutionary.
37:35
And revolution was also a bad word up until then.
37:41
Johnathan Bi: And then in our modern period, innovation I think began to become rehabilitated by Bentham, the Utilitarians.
37:42
Once you think about things in terms of utility, there's a natural idea of trying to maximalize it, which innovations are required to do that.
37:53
Obviously the French Revolution rehabilitated as well.
37:58
But in terms of this fundamental question of what I think about that and why may this happen, I would say that innovation has undergone one of the biggest flips from negative to positive, over the past few centuries.
38:09
I would say it's probably because our fundamental conception of time has changed in some important way.
38:16
Whereas even in the time of the Reformation, it was a dissent, it was focused on the past.
38:22
Whereas now, we're much more oriented to the future.
38:22
I think because of that, alongside other philosophical changes, as you can tell, I'm still working through this myself.
38:31
I think that's why innovation took upon a positive word and why it was such a negative word in basically much of antiquity, as well as even in the Dark Ages, so to speak.
38:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, what about that though?
38:44
I mean, if we were to look at, just as objectively as we could, at the Dark Ages, to pick up on that particular period of history, it seems to me that we're not going to find too much of anything good there.
39:03
We're going to find stasis, we're going to find lack of any material progress.
39:03
I seem to recall an economist, so probably wrong, my degree is in economics, saying that it took us until something like 1801 to regain the per capita income that was enjoyed by a Roman citizen in AD 1.
39:24
And so, let's just say that directionally that economist was correct.
39:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, by that measure, by just that one measure, and I agree that we could argue all day long about which is the right measure to use, but just on that one measure, we basically had net no progress in humanity for thousands of years.
39:45
And I for one would be ...
39:45
I mean, I as you know, usually look for things to root for as opposed to against.
39:54
But I'm going to root against a thousand years of darkness.
40:01
Johnathan Bi: Let me play devil's advocate here.
40:03
Obviously I'm in the 21st Century and in the tech sector, so I can't dispute that too much.
40:06
Johnathan Bi: But I don't know, there's something very odd about our concept of innovation, progress.
40:08
This idea that everything has to be progressing infinitely, that there's no end.
40:14
That the goal of life is to progress.
40:19
And Tocqueville used to make fun of the Americans when he came over to visit.
40:19
He said the Americans all wanted to self-improve.
40:25
And you see this today, they always wanted to improve, but it's so minute improvements that they're making.
40:30
It's so trivial and they're all oriented to the future, they're not focused on the present.
40:35
Johnathan Bi: In fact, another book I'm reading right now is called ‘The Invention Of Improvement.
40:36
’ And it's about how the word improvement came to be.
40:39
It was invented in English.
40:43
There was no direct counterpart in any of the continental European languages, I think for the first few centuries.
40:47
And do you know where the concept came from, improvement? Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
40:51
Johnathan Bi: It came from the improvement of land, so either- Jim O'Shaughnessy: That makes sense. Johnathan Bi: ...
40:55
getting a bit more crops from your plot of land, finding a way to juice up your rent.
40:57
And then all the intuitions from this concept of improvement, this marginal, somewhat infinite, increased material, of course.
41:09
When improvement became a politically charged word that people could rally around, this notion of improvement and progress started seeping into morality, politics, technology.
41:14
But at the end of the day, I mean, the jesting way to look at us is that we're all these minor petty bourgeoisie trying to improve our plot of land in the moral sphere and the academic sphere, economic sphere.
41:30
Johnathan Bi: I mean, I don't know, let me put it this way.
41:34
The people that I think want progress the most, or tend to ...
41:34
or a people who tend to really want progress, are those whose current lives are quite unsatisfactory.
41:45
In some sense, this is Feuerbach's critique of Christianity, that the Christians project all the good attributes of man into this wondrous beyond and as a result, rob themselves of it.
41:57
Johnathan Bi: And so obviously, it's hard for one to argue against progress, the material goods, but I think it injects a sort of triviality into the world, to think about ...
42:05
and I was this too, just like you were an economist, I don't feel bad about critiquing it.
42:09
Think about all those people waiting for the new iPhone releases and being so excited about, "Oh, there's a new camera spec bump.
42:15
Five megapixels to seven, this is going to change everything."
42:20
And you watch these YouTube ...
42:20
Gain some distance to it and you watch these YouTube tech review people and they're like, "Oh my God, the new AirPods. It changes everything."
42:31
I think it misses a lot about life and when humans fundamentally are.
42:31
This narrow focus on economic progress, so that there's definitely tradeoffs.
42:36
That's one critique, that's the ethical critique.
42:41
I'd like to hear your response to it, but let me throw you two fast balls at once.
42:46
Johnathan Bi: The other critique, and this is something we brought up last time, but I'm really thinking about now that I'm thinking about innovation and how odd and unique our notion of innovation and openness to the new is in modernity, which is if you look at our track record at innovation, creating new things. I mean, it's not great.
43:06
It's not terrible of course, with TV, you and I are talking face-to-face, whereas we would've traveled by horse, I don't know, three hours to go to Connecticut or something like that.
43:16
But we almost blew ourselves up in the Cuban missile crisis.
43:16
It's hard not to see how we don't have a major nuclear catastrophe in 200, 300 years if there's a major conflict somehow.
43:27
AI, as you know, the reason you're an investor in Stability.
43:27
AI, I listen to your podcast, I did my rabbit hole digging as well, is because you recognize the clear potential for massive apocalyptic danger here.
43:37
Johnathan Bi: Climate change is manmade.
43:39
The amount of deaths in World War I and World War II, I don't see ...
43:44
Biotech will enable us to potentially create two or even multiple castes of men.
43:50
Some enhanced genetics, some not.
43:50
I don't know, I'm coming to this sort of Greek view as perhaps best not to innovate until forced to do so.
43:58
But I'm playing the devil's advocate here because I want to hear your response.
44:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So boy, I don't even know where to begin.
44:04
My grandfather was born in 1885, and when he was born, there were no cars.
44:09
Everything was horse-drawn.
44:09
Now, there were cars experimentally, but there weren't cars everywhere.
44:14
Johnathan Bi: No model T.
44:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They had no electricity. They had no antibiotics.
44:17
So he, much like President Coolidge's son could have, had it happened to him ...
44:25
To build himself up for college football, he was a lumberjack, cutting down trees in Stillwater, Minnesota.
44:31
And President Coolidge's son was a tennis player playing tennis on the lawn of the White House and he got a sliver from his wood racket, and he died.
44:47
He died from a sliver because we don't have antibiotics, and so could my grandfather have died.
44:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the list is rather endless from just the lifetime of my grandfather.
44:54
He was born in 1885, he died in 1973.
45:02
What he saw, I would submit to you, was endless and mostly positive innovation.
45:12
I personally don't know about you, but if I had access to a time machine, I don't know, unless I could bring all sorts of my own antibiotics and soap and everything else, whether I would want to go into the past at all.
45:24
I would view the past as being as- Johnathan Bi: Compared to you and I where we're at right now, or the median?
45:31
Because that's a very different question.
45:31
I mean, the median person on Earth right now is probably a Foxconn worker who's alienated and ...
45:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, to that, I would cite the Institute for Human Progress, saying that over the last two decades, one billion people have stopped dying of dysentery and have emerged from poverty.
45:49
And again, they go into making up that median.
45:49
So, it's interesting to me because it does sound almost like a discussion.
45:57
I wouldn't elevate it to argument a discussion- Johnathan Bi: Elevate away.
46:06
I think arguments are productive, especially when they're done in good company.
46:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They are.
46:10
But you'll see in a minute why I don't elevate it.
46:12
It seems almost like we are having a conversation between optimism and pessimism.
46:20
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, right.
46:20
I think that's right, yeah.
46:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And for me, I've always said, pessimists sounds smart and optimists make money.
46:25
Now, of course, my position is that of rational optimist, I put rational in front of it to avoid the Panglossian- Johnathan Bi: Naive optimist, yeah.
46:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Or Dr.
46:39
Pangloss from Candide, right?
46:39
"This is the best of all- Johnathan Bi: Right, right, right, right. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... possible worlds."
46:44
I don't believe any of that at all.
46:46
I believe that as you just listed, there are serious problems that we face now, will face in the future.
46:54
It's my expectation that the problems will become more serious, but that's only because we will have solved some of the less serious ones going forward.
47:00
So, problems are always with us, or our perception is that that problems are always with us.
47:06
And so, just on the basic stats, if we cover ourselves with a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, I would still much rather be born in 2022 or 2023, than I would've wished to have been born in 1822 or 1823.
47:34
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah.
47:34
I would say I probably wish to be born as a ...
47:38
I would be okay being born as a peasant in medieval Europe post-Black Plague, because there was a massive labor shortage and labor had incredible negotiation powers.
47:46
I mean, you read the stories about these peasants post-Black Plague, and it's really incredible.
47:54
They had like a hundred days or something of festivals in some of these years.
47:54
There was community, there was religion there.
47:59
Johnathan Bi: I mean, I feel I'm very fortunate in my position in modernity, so I wouldn't change that.
48:01
Now, would I trade it to become a aristocrat in Chinese antiquity?
48:06
That's a more serious question but I don't know.
48:13
And by the way, I think you are right by the way, about a conversation between a pessimist and an optimist.
48:17
If I may stab the sword deeper in myself, that perhaps you were too kind to do so.
48:23
Another way of saying that is that, Johnathan, your anxiety is just freaking itself out and it's latching onto something.
48:29
Johnathan Bi: And Sam Altman actually had a great tweet, I think the other day, where he said, " I think AI risk is just people who are paranoid, who would've been worried about witches in the 17th century.
48:36
Now they're worried about AI risk."
48:41
I think that's the fundamentally right view to view people that what is core to them, Girardian position as well, is a sort of certain disposition.
48:46
And so, their opinions almost ...
48:53
Nietzsche had this great line, or I'm going to paraphrase here.
48:53
It's something like, “the book that an author writes is more of a confession about the author himself than it is about the subject matter.
49:02
” I think that's fundamentally right and I think I am a very paranoid ...
49:07
I wouldn't say pessimistic, but very, very ... quite a paranoid person.
49:07
And the other way to cut it, and maybe a more charitable way to cut it, is that the optimist makes the airplane, the pessimist makes the perch.
49:16
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, but before we jump into anything else, let me ask you this.
49:17
It seems like innovation is arming humanity with increasingly powerful means.
49:23
Whether it's through biology, whether it's through a weaponry or it's through intelligence, computation.
49:29
Where does your faith lay that we'll be able to helm that power properly?
49:36
Because I mean, most of antiquity's ...
49:36
a lot of antiquity concerns is the inability for man to, for example, get access to truth.
49:45
"From the tree of good and evil, though shall not eat."
49:50
Oedipus, he wanted to tempt fate.
49:50
In some sense, I would say that, and Girard I think would agree with me here, but he's also a pessimist, to say the least. To say the least.
50:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: An apocalyptic, the world will end soon, dammit.
50:03
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah, to say the least.
50:06
Where was I going with this?
50:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You were asking me about my worries.
50:12
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah. Oh, I remember.
50:13
The last point I was going to make is I think modern man, I think exaggerates his agency, his ability to control things.
50:18
And maybe the Greek view is too pessimistic.
50:18
No matter what Oedipus does, or what Leontes does, they're all going to be subject to fate and, sorry, Leontes, Shakespeare, what's Oedipus' name again?
50:30
Anyways, Oedipus' father, whatever his father does, whatever Oedipus does, fate will always catch up to them.
50:35
That's probably too pessimistic but where does your ... I'll turn it on you.
50:39
Why are you so confident that we'll be able to steward these technologies properly?
50:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I think first off, you have to establish the nuance between being excited about them and one's level of confidence that nothing will go wrong.
50:53
I don't have a level of confidence that nothing will go wrong.
51:00
In fact, I anticipate that much will go wrong.
51:00
And it is only through better explanations and better understandings that we will be able to tackle some of these problems.
51:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The ancients, if you will, were completely unready to tackle any of these problems because they had not built the body of knowledge, the human colossus, so to speak, that we have been building, well, maybe since Gutenberg, since we were allowed to time bind our ideas and send them into the future.
51:30
So, I think that we talked about AI before.
51:37
AI, I think, it depends on which track you go down.
51:37
If you go down the track where AI is closed, and you mentioned Jeremy Bentham a bit ago, father of utilitarianism, and as you probably know, his stuffed body is on display at his former college in London.
51:57
Johnathan Bi: I did not that, wow, that sounds interesting.
51:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, you can go visit it.
51:57
He's not the best looking guy.
52:01
He hasn't been well preserved, but- Johnathan Bi: He's got a few years on him.
52:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly.
52:05
But Bentham, when I heard you mention him, I immediately thought he was a great example because utilitarianism, which he came up, with was originally thought to be a very kind philosophy, in that many of the ideas advanced by it were done to make things better for humans.
52:29
Because at the time they were horrible, right? Johnathan Bi: Yeah.
52:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And thus, the panopticon was invented by Bentham.
52:33
And for those who don't know what a panopticon is, it's a single tower at the center of a circular prison.
52:42
And into this tower, you cannot see the prisoners.
52:49
All of the prisoners don't face out, they don't see the landscape, they look in and all they see is the panopticon.
52:55
And under Bentham, he thought that this was an act of generosity and kindness to the prisoners, so that they would not be housed in the squalor and depravity of the British prisons of the time, right? Johnathan Bi: Right.
53:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: This was going to be progress, this was going to be innovation that helped these poor souls, who were locked up for a variety of reasons.
53:23
Well, that first principle was in good faith on Bentham's part.
53:31
But then when we got to the secondary and tertiary effects of a panopticon, became not a wonderful thing at all.
53:38
It became quite an object- Johnathan Bi: Terror. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
53:45
of terror, right, because as we learned about human psychology, we learned that one of the worst things for a human is this idea that they can never relax and just be themselves, if only for a second.
53:57
And the panopticon, because they don't know who's watching and when, they default to the idea that they're always being watched, they're always being controlled, and all of their agency is taken from them by a panopticon.
54:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, if we go the closed route, we have a very few in a panopticon making decisions for the very many.
54:21
And I think that that's a very bad outcome, which is one of the reasons why I invested in and have chairman of Stability.
54:29
AI because it is open source.
54:36
But there are still problems there, right?
54:36
Johnathan Bi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
54:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: There is no panacea that's going to solve all of our problems.
54:41
But open source, why is that better?
54:48
Well, because if you know anything about the ability of minds to work well together, one of the things you really want to add to the mix is cognitive diversity.
54:59
It is very presumptuous and quite haughty, in my opinion, for me to presume that I am going to be able to know what every good idea is going to be.
55:07
It's absurd on the face of it.
55:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: When you open things up, like we did on August 22nd, when we released our entire model with weights, we had a Cambrian-like explosion of innovation and creativity.
55:20
So, on that particular question, I think that the tools that AI makes possible, for example, the ability to further interrogate liminal spaces where human minds can't go, I think we are going to find an enormous amount of information there.
55:46
As a matter of fact, as I was preparing for my discussion with you, I had the thought, boy, it'll be interesting to see what AI makes of Girard because one- Johnathan Bi: Yeah, I tried.
55:56
GPT-3 isn't good on him, yet, thank God for me. Thank God for me.
56:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, maybe our stable diffusion models will have a little [inaudible]- Johnathan Bi: There you go. You'll get me.
56:04
It's coming for everything I hold most dear.
56:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the point is that I remain optimistic because we continue to go further and our understandings continue to be better and better.
56:19
Are they often and sometimes completely wrong and misguided? Of course.
56:26
That is part and parcel of what it means to be a member of human society.
56:26
So, rather than vote for stasis, and status quo, and- Johnathan Bi: Withdrawal, yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... withdrawal. I go the other way. I go for movement. Life is movement.
56:45
Life is not stasis, it is not standing still.
56:45
Johnathan Bi: Right, yeah, yeah.
56:49
I suppose a good analogy here would be something like we're beginner skiers and we're on a double black run and- Jim O'Shaughnessy: That actually happened to me.
56:56
That actually happened to me as a beginner skier.
57:00
Johnathan Bi: And the stasis guy just wants to peter down as slow as possible, or edge his way down as slow as possible.
57:05
Whereas the accelerationist just says, "Screw it.
57:13
Let's just give this a try and see how it goes."
57:13
I mean, the one thing I'll say, and those will turn this argument or discussion, I don't care too much what we call it, I'm quite enjoying this, bring it to a nice synthesis is that, as I've told our listeners, I'm in tech as well. I'm very interested.
57:29
I was actually somewhat trained in AI and CS specifically at Columbia.
57:29
I'm very interested in these things as well.
57:35
And in some sense, I don't think we have an option to peter down the hill, so to speak.
57:40
Johnathan Bi: The cat's out of the bag and the only way out is through, so even if ...
57:42
and I'm not even sure I hold this position, but I think I'm certainly much more sympathetic to this position than you are.
57:52
A lot of this episode, I was playing devil's advocate to really tease out your views because I was so interested.
57:55
Even if I did believe that it was good, let's say before around the Reformation to put the cat in the box and to not progress further, that doesn't change the fact that the cat is already jumping out of the box and there's no way to get it back in.
58:09
Johnathan Bi: There's no way to stop the unending advance of science.
58:12
If you stop it in one nation, another nation will take the baton and that nation will become more powerful, more dominant.
58:17
So, unless you plan on nuking the world yourself and bringing the apocalypse, or Ted Kaczynski-ing everyone, and even that didn't work, there's really no way to put the cat in the box.
58:26
Johnathan Bi: So unfortunately, I think that we got to go down the hill.
58:29
We got to go down the double black run guns, guns blazing.
58:34
But I think the difference is that even though we're both going down the hill, so to speak, you do it with joy and screams and cheering, whereas I do it with fear and trembling, but we're both going down the hill regardless.
58:44
We're both going down this rabbit hole.
58:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is an excellent way to summarize it because that's true.
58:52
And I have found that Ellen Watts says that worry is an endlessly peeled onion that will...
59:00
People who are given to worry and paranoia are essentially that...
59:00
You mentioned it earlier actually.
59:09
They'll just find something new to worry about.
59:09
If the other goes away, find a new thing to focus- Johnathan Bi: I do want to say that I think it can be quite productive.
59:18
In fact, some of my friends who are AI researchers and you talk to them and they all have this sense that you really, really need to be cautious.
59:27
And I think heightened degree of paranoia there isn't the worst thing.
59:27
In fact, I often oscillate between what it really takes to build a really great startup, whether it's sort of complete delusional optimism, the sort of Girard, sorry the sort of Jobsian reality distortion field, or it's sort of paralyzed and paranoia.
59:43
And I think I've come to the conclusion is that it has to be both at the same time.
59:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I actually agree with you about that.
59:49
I think that to try to continue the discussion about AI to try to be, again panglossian about it is a fool's errand because there are easy-to-identify problems that we already know about right now.
1:00:04
For example, deep fakes and what they can do to the credibility of any number of people who could be destroyed by big video of them saying something that is an anathema to the way they actually think about things.
1:00:19
So my answer for all of that is, there's a quote, I can't remember who said it, but I love it.
1:00:26
It's like, so we discovered fire and good for humanity.
1:00:32
It gave us bigger brains because we were able to cook our meat.
1:00:32
It warmed our hearts, it did all these incredible things, but it was also one of the most destructive powers on earth at that time.
1:00:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so what did we do? We didn't ban fire.
1:00:48
We had fire departments, fire warnings, fire extinguishers, fire exits.
1:00:57
And so speaking of deep fakes, staying on that theme for a moment, one of the things we're doing is we are funding a contest.
1:01:06
Stability AI is putting up a hundred thousand dollar bounty and O’Shaughnessy Ventures, because I believe in this so deeply, is adding another a hundred thousand.
1:01:17
So it will be a $200,000 prize for a competition to see who can write code that comes up with the best deep fake detection.
1:01:32
Now, I have no illusions about this.
1:01:32
This will be a continual war.
1:01:32
And that's how we got deep fakes in the first place.
1:01:39
The adversarial nature of the two programs working against each other.
1:01:45
But my point is, if it reaches a hurdle rate for now, right?
1:01:45
So for 2023, if there's a hurdle rate, and let's say it's identifying 90% just to pick a number of deep fakes, we're not only going to...
1:02:02
Obviously we're going to pay the $200,000 to the coder who gave us this code, but we are also going to distribute it for free.
1:02:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It will be available on everyone's iPhone, everyone's Google phone, every download site in the world is going to have this software so that everyone can have it for free.
1:02:23
And then we're going to continue to iterate.
1:02:23
Then we are going to continue to try to make it better because our adversaries are going to make the adversarial model better too.
1:02:30
And then another aspect of it is the whole idea of...
1:02:37
It seems to me that people are afraid of the wrong things.
1:02:45
I think that people are afraid of generalized artificial intelligence or that which is sentient, right? So Terminator style.
1:02:52
I would argue that we still don't understand the nature of qualia, which is a deeply needed thing in trying to explain consciousness, right?
1:03:00
Like right now- Johnathan Bi: After 3000 years, we made very little progress.
1:03:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, exactly.
1:03:11
And I have many neuroscientists who are friends and I ask them about this and talk about pessimistic.
1:03:17
They all are like, oh, my God, we don't even, we have no idea about qualia.
1:03:23
And for those who don't know what qualia is, the best example that I've found is the Pixar movie, Ratatouille, where the normally quite dour critic comes into the restaurant where the rats are the chefs, right?
1:03:37
And they make him some Ratatouille.
1:03:44
And it's in the scene where he takes his first bite of the Ratatouille because what the animators at Pixar do, so brilliant, it to illustrate qualia, is they send him right back to his childhood and he's a little boy coming in.
1:03:58
His mother hugs him, he feels safe, he's coming from the cold, he comes into the warm house, his mother embraces him and she gives him the Ratatouille and all is right with the world, right?
1:04:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So what does that mean?
1:04:16
At some external stimulus evokes all of these feelings once you've seen the idea of smell, when you smell a certain thing, you're immediately transported back to when you were seven playing in the cedar closet and shouldn't have been and et cetera.
1:04:33
But the point is if we can't...
1:04:37
First off define qualia, we can't program qualia.
1:04:37
And it seems to me, again...
1:04:48
Very possible that I'm wrong, but it seems to me that qualia is a very, it's not only nice to have, it's need to have if you want to program artificial intelligence that can become sentient.
1:05:04
So I think that's what most people are afraid of.
1:05:04
They're afraid of James Cameron's version of AI, which is, Arnold’s Terminator, “I will be back” and I love the movie, got to doff the cap to the guy.
1:05:19
He did a great job, but he did it, in my opinion, huge disservice to the telling… Black Mirror.
1:05:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We started a competition at Infinite Loops, this wonderful podcast that we're on right now that we called White Mirror.
1:05:34
So many of the scientific right fiction stories of the past, of the recent past.
1:05:41
This is important because Jules Verne, who was... He was science fiction.
1:05:50
He was not negative at all in most respects.
1:05:50
It became a symptom of a more modern age, which was quite pessimistic.
1:05:57
And in which we saw dystopias, not utopias.
1:05:57
My point being though that we collectively create the world, and by we, I mean, all sentient beings on this planet currently numbering 8 billion that I know of.
1:06:12
Maybe there are some lurkers from other places in the galaxy, I don't know.
1:06:18
But that all sentient creatures believe sort of, and that creates your base reality, that creates your ground state reality, right?
1:06:25
And so we're inventing this as we go along.
1:06:31
I just think that people are afraid of something that isn't what AI really is.
1:06:31
My friend Jeremiah Lowin...
1:06:37
And then I'll let you respond.
1:06:37
My friend Jeremiah Lowin, who's a technologist, said in a recent episode that I did with him, he goes, and folks on artificial intelligence, let me just say this, it's not artificial, it's not intelligence, it's an algorithm. Get over it.
1:06:56
Johnathan Bi: That's a good one. It's like a...
1:06:58
I forget who says it, the holy Roman empire's neither Holy Roman- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love that one. Nor an Empire.
1:07:02
Johnathan Bi: I will say he reminded me a lot of your optimism, at least of a gentleman by the name of Joe Lonsdale, who building a company with for the last two years.
1:07:10
And he has this podcast called American Optimist.
1:07:10
And in part it's battling against this sort of pessimistic sort of anti-tech sentiments that I've been channeling, I suppose in this episode, to play devil's advocate.
1:07:21
I was going to say, okay, this is what...
1:07:21
I'll tell you what I was going to say, but I thought then I thought something new.
1:07:25
I was going to say, I think, you and Joe’s this sort of optimism perhaps is the only way to proceed forward.
1:07:36
That is to say, if everyone is as pessimistic as Girard, we're doomed to fail.
1:07:36
But if- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Agree, agree.
1:07:42
Johnathan Bi: Even if their agency is misguided, they're exaggerated since of their own agency's misguided, it still does not preclude the possibility of failure.
1:07:48
Johnathan Bi: But at least there is a possibility of success if there's people like yourself who are actively trying to direct these forces.
1:07:54
And maybe one of my favorite lines from Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ is you're not a lottery ticket.
1:08:01
You're not a mere leaf blown in the wind.
1:08:01
This is the Greek view in some sense, right?
1:08:09
And that wind would be fake. Yeah.
1:08:09
So you definitely give me a lot to think about.
1:08:11
Now I was going to say that as a concession, but then I thought of another, perhaps less charitable, and again, I'm being very playful here, really solution, which is maybe we can ban innovation or at least certain types of innovation.
1:08:20
What I call to mind is, I believe, and I just read one paragraph on this, so I'm going to have to read some more, that in the 1960s we stopped.
1:08:29
We'd agreed unilaterally to stop biochemical weaponry research across the world.
1:08:36
I actually don't know if that's true.
1:08:36
I'd be surprised if we actually stopped.
1:08:41
But if such a thing were to be possible, maybe there's another thing, for example, fission or something like that.
1:08:46
We just say, okay, like fusion...
1:08:46
Is it fusion or fission that we've solved? The nuke is fusion.
1:08:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What we want is fission.
1:08:52
Johnathan Bi: Right, right. Okay.
1:08:53
So we have fusion, maybe we say fusion...
1:08:53
That's given us enough trouble already.
1:08:58
Maybe let's just unilaterally agree not to explore fission.
1:08:58
Again, I'm not championing that mentality, but I am saying if one does believe that we are able to stop explorations in certain technological areas, perhaps for certain areas.
1:09:09
And I think most people agree that bio weaponry research is a good place to stop.
1:09:14
It does make sense to sort of put things out of bounds.
1:09:19
Now, I don't know if we can actually do that, and I don't know if we actually stop.
1:09:23
I'd be very surprised if we actually unilaterally stop by weaponry research.
1:09:28
But yeah, those are my response. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:09:30
So I appreciate and agree with your first thought.
1:09:33
Johnathan Bi: I figured you would, which is why it's a concession.
1:09:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: On the second thought, that's falling right into the David Deutsch trap of assuming that you know with certainty that whatever you want to go out and ban is something that it will do a true good by banning it.
1:09:51
Not to even bring up your observation, which I think is correct.
1:09:58
Where we say that it was banned, but come on, you'd have to be a pretty small child and still believe in a certain, someone coming down the chimney to understand or to truly believe that that was banned. Because come on.
1:10:09
Johnathan Bi: Oh, unilaterally renounced, right? [inaudible].
1:10:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
1:10:13
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more.
1:10:13
But it also made me think about the idea of the inability to prophesize to...
1:10:20
Let me give you an example, a historical example.
1:10:32
So under the rubric of we're going to ban something, which everyone agrees, that's a loaded phrase.
1:10:39
And again- Johnathan Bi: Can I say one thing here?
1:10:41
I promise I'll let you finish your story.
1:10:41
I think in ancient Judeo law, there's actually a very interesting term, and Girard brings this up, where if everyone agrees that someone is guilty, they're let loose.
1:10:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: They're let loose. Yes. I know.
1:10:53
Johnathan Bi: Because they must be...
1:10:54
They're like, there's something must have gone wrong.
1:10:54
And I think the Girard interpretation here is, if everyone...
1:10:57
And not just agreement two plus two equals four, but fervent agreement, like that is a witch over there, we're all going to die in 200 years if everyone agrees like that, I think the majority in intuition is that there's so much social force to believe we should genuinely ask whether there's something real that belief is pointed towards. Does that make sense?
1:11:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, it does.
1:11:18
And I know all about that, and I applauded.
1:11:18
I think it was actually something that we could have used for...
1:11:23
Useful, very useful from our past and from our past traditions.
1:11:29
Johnathan Bi: But anyways, I interrupted you- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, no, no, that's fine. That's fine.
1:11:31
It's along the lines of the... Everyone thinks, right?
1:11:31
So I'm generally get triggered whenever anyone says something like everyone thinks to me, because I will immediately say, I don't even know what topic they're talking about.
1:11:44
And I might say, well, I don't.
1:11:49
But I think of the story of Semmelweis who was a doctor in the 1800s in Vienna, and he was assigned to the woman's pregnancy hospital, and he got this idea that the women...
1:12:07
He noticed that the women who were attended by male surgeons as opposed to female midwives were dying at vastly higher rates than the women.
1:12:14
Johnathan Bi: Right, right. Yeah, yeah.
1:12:17
He was a nasty person, I believe as well.
1:12:17
Buts that's part of the- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:12:20
Let's keep his personality out, okay?
1:12:23
So let's keep it on his- Johnathan Bi: I hold back my ad hominem.
1:12:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, let's keep it on his intuition, which was born from observation.
1:12:27
So he noticed that the one thing that distinguished, other than their sex between the male doctor and the female midwife was at the time, it was seen as very unmanly to wash your hands or clean your hands.
1:12:52
So very often a male doctor would go from dissecting a cadaver to giving birth with all of those...
1:13:01
They didn't know they were germs because germ theory was also rejected by medicine.
1:13:01
Boy, if you really want to get depressed, look at what medicine knew when they knew it and then when it adopted it, it's tragic.
1:13:13
Anyway, so he said, I think it's the dirty hands.
1:13:13
I want you all to wash your hands in this combination of lie.
1:13:22
And he had some other things in there, and all the men are outraged, but you want us to be women and no, we're not going to do that.
1:13:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And besides, “you're wrong, Semmelweis.
1:13:36
It's the priest ringing the death bell when one of the mothers dies.
1:13:36
” That influences a very memetic influence on the very deadly memetic influence on the other women.
1:13:44
So Semmelweis says, okay, that's an interesting observation.
1:13:50
So what does Semmelweis do?
1:13:50
He has the priest stop ringing the death bell, and guess what?
1:13:55
Deaths don't change at all.
1:13:55
And so he's like, “wasn't the bell, you're washing your fucking hands.
1:14:03
” And they all did in protest. And what happened?
1:14:03
The death rate of the women attended by the male physicians drastically declined because they weren't infecting them anymore.
1:14:20
The sad part of this story though, is because of everyone knowing that it was effeminate for men to wash their hands, the social desire to ban or to mitigate what this lunatic Semmelweis wanted, was so strong that when...
1:14:38
You'd mentioned that he was a disagreeable type, yes he was.
1:14:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it got him into trouble politically, and he was removed from his position and his successor came in, saw this, and he goes, what is all this hand washing thing? And stopped it. Now, here's my point.
1:14:53
Everybody knew that that was the way things were, right?
1:15:02
So like banning, banning men washing their hands would've gone over huge back in Semmelweis', Vienna.
1:15:07
Bad outcome, really bad outcome because it stopped learning, it stopped progress, it stopped new information.
1:15:17
And his successor, I would forgive, save one thing.
1:15:28
Semmelweis kept very detailed records of the death rate and number of deaths pre his intervention and post his intervention, his successor was so bound up in his societal beliefs, one would almost put them in a memetic category that he refused the empirical information before his very eyes and banned the hand washing for reasons that had nothing to do with factual information. What happened?
1:16:05
Women went back to dying at accelerated rates, all those lost lives.
1:16:13
So I'm not a big fan of banning.
1:16:13
Johnathan Bi: And more importantly, you think if it can't be banned, right?
1:16:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right? Johnathan Bi: Right. Right.
1:16:21
So I guess that leaves me back to screaming down the hill, fear, and trembling.
1:16:27
I'm back to my point of concession because if you can't stop this, the only way out is through.
1:16:34
I mean, that is the position I'm in right now, right?
1:16:34
That's why that's in tech.
1:16:34
And that's why I am interested in AI and reading Bostrom and trying to figure out how other things in the- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I totally like him, love him, actually.
1:16:45
And I'm looking at the time, my God, you and I could talk to each other for hours. Okay.
1:16:45
Well, Johnathan, I always have a wonderful time chatting with you because you provide a series of thoughts and a framework, which I love to see challenging and yet moving things forward.
1:17:02
So we will no doubt do this again, but as I asked you, after our first visit in the Infinite Loops, I'm going to give you double down.
1:17:11
We're giving you a magic microphone and you get to speak in it.
1:17:18
You can't say anything bad, but what you can do is you can say two statements that will incept all eight billion people on this planet.
1:17:26
And when they wake up the next morning, they're going to think, I've just had the most wonderful idea or ideas, and I'm going to do X.
1:17:43
You get two, what two X's are you giving us?
1:17:43
Johnathan Bi: I'm going to do one.
1:17:46
I've actually been thinking about this because I figured you'd ask me this question, but to preface this, the last time I told you that I was going to pump some kind of shit coin, because I fundamentally don't have the moral either confidence or arrogance to know yet still quite young and figuring stuff out clearly of what is good for everyone and what people should believe in.
1:18:07
But this time I think I have a pretty good idea.
1:18:07
It's still not world-changing, but I would say in antiquity, it was the small phallus that was considered desirable because it symbolized the virtue of moderation.
1:18:16
A re-evaluation of values maybe.
1:18:29
And with that, we're out.
1:18:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So are you going to buy a Porsche next or what's going on?
1:18:40
Listen, this was so much fun. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on.
1:18:45
Johnathan Bi: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.