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Dan King
@pbrey3o
Thinking about progress through error correction
United States
Joined January 2013
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Asking "what is the purpose of life" is the wrong emphasis.
A better question: what do rational people do that has real significance?
Our current best answer: Creating explanatory knowledge
@yashar We should have had the freedom to try this 20+ years ago. Those whose preferences matched the risk/reward would have been the natural (and free) trial group. Bureaucratic stasis is harmful.
https://t.co/HsqgN50W7J
5: Pharmaceuticals
Imagine having six months to live and being barred from an experimental drug because it lacks full FDA approval. The agency’s blanket rules ignore the reality that every individual faces a unique problem set, risk tolerance, and time horizon. In a data-rich world, the enlightened default is freedom to try—accompanied by transparent safety data, independent rating systems, liability waivers, and real-world tracking.
This approach would also sharply lower drug development costs: individuals who want to experiment can try the drugs or treatments and generate valuable data without relying solely on lengthy and expensive formal clinical trials. Restrictions would remain only for fraud, hidden data, or forced treatment. We discover what works by testing bold ideas in reality, not by shielding them from criticism.
Protecting an idea from criticism doesn’t make it true. It only guarantees you won’t discover whether it’s wrong, because it blocks error correction. This is immoral: you blind yourself to whether the idea is causing harm to yourself or others.
When faith functions as resistance to criticism, it disables creativity, the process that solves problems. Inside that bubble, counter-evidence is simply interpreted as further confirmation through the theory that you’ve deemed to be “true”.
An unproblematic mind is a mind that has stopped solving problems. That is a form of death. It’s a shame, because people are capable of unbounded creativity and we inhabit a universe that permits the unbounded growth of knowledge.
Trying to discuss evidence or criticism with someone committed to an immunized idea is often circular. Both sides could converge if neither resisted criticism, yet people can resist criticism indefinitely. Still, it is not always a waste of time. People can change their minds.
"Belief, of course, is never rational: it is rational to suspend belief" — Karl Popper (Unended Quest, 1974)
This highlights a key difference between humans and other animals. Non-human animals are not universal explainers or even domain-specific ones. They embody knowledge generated by evolution through variation and selection, much like we do, but without the software layer of creative conjecture and criticism. A plant, for example, puts into practice the knowledge required for photosynthesis without understanding anything.
There are still major open questions around consciousness, creativity, qualia, and how these relate to the capacity to suffer. I tentatively agree with Brett Hall’s suggestion that non-human “consciousness” may be closer to the experience of driving a familiar route on “autopilot” while your mind is elsewhere. The absence of that creative, understanding layer might be the closest way to imagine what it is like to be alive and sentient without the capacity for understanding. In that sense, it resembles death in that it is the absence of what makes a person a person: the active, creative mind.
Idea: You cannot think outside your problem situation because there is no such thing as thinking outside problems.
You cannot directly represent the state of being dead since it’s the absence of any mental states. Similarly, there is no way of generating a theory-free or problem-free thought.
Criticism always has something to criticize, and conjecture arises as a creative response to a problem situation (clash of ideas), even if only implicit. There is no view from nowhere.
This does not mean we are trapped by our current problems. Conjecture is never the random creation of ideas in search of a use. A good explanation generates new problems that could not previously have been conceived which expand what is thinkable (the feature that makes unbounded progress possible).
So even though we are universal explainers, in practice we only think within our existing knowledge and problem situation until we make progress. This is why the growth of knowledge is inherently unpredictable.
David Deutsch: “An unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.”
Karl Popper: “Life and knowledge proceed from problems. All life is problem solving.”
David Deutsch: “The fact that solutions always create new problems is not, on balance, a drawback but their most useful attribute. Science ought to be regarded as a transition from one problem situation to the next.”
Islam could destroy the United States from within. Athens’ enlightenment was snuffed out by the Spartans. But an open society that is willing to criticize bad ideas, including intolerant ones, and to reform its own ideas has the means to actually solve this problem over time. There is no guarantee it will succeed. There is also no guarantee that a closed society will remain stable.
China’s approach of suppressing criticism and dissent avoids many immediate problems that we face. But suppression is a blunt tool that also prevents the creation of new solutions. Every society faces problems. The question is whether it has the means to correct its errors and improve. A system that treats criticism itself as the threat becomes brittle: it cannot adapt when reality changes or when its own policies produce unexpected failures. It also rests on a moral error: the assumption that some people have the right to decide which ideas others may think.
An open society can defend itself without abandoning openness. It can exclude or restrain those who seek to destroy the framework of criticism itself. Trying to freeze society by suppressing disagreement or creative thought takes away your only advantage. That strategy has repeatedly failed throughout history, even if the failures are less visible than the rare long-lived static societies.
Blanket bans on Islam are probably too untenable in the West. They'd block progress anyways (internal reform through criticism). A better approach is to outlaw and strictly enforce against the coercive practices:
- Punishing of dissent (Apostasy and blasphemy)
- Coercive control over women and girls
- Parallel Sharia or clan-based legal systems
- Advocacy of violence to impose the faith
- Public religious impositions (calls to prayer)
- Subversion of individual rights
Karl Popper: “If we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have..."
Popper’s "open society" is not a safe utopia where all problems are solved; it is an environment that protects the right to make mistakes and criticize them. The moment a society tries to eliminate all uncertainty and insecurity, it is forced to freeze its current knowledge in place. It has to declare certain ideas or authorities above criticism to keep things predictable.
But this static security is brittle and anti-progress. We didn't solve hunger by following a risk-free master plan. Weexperimented with plenty of bad ideas, and once we found the solutions, they led to new problems like obesity. We then had to invent further solutions, like weight-loss drugs.
Reason doesn't protect us from making errors, but it does allow for progress. The messiness we see in the West could be our demise, but if we keep our institutions of criticism and error correction, it will also be the means by which we find our next solutions.
Examples:
- Starvation/famine → obesity → gyms and weight loss drugs
- Industrial Revolution → pollution → environmental science
- Civil rights expansions → institutional friction → new cultural debates on outcome vs. opportunity
- Internet & social media → screen time concerns & polarization → Community Notes, algorithmic transparency, and cultural pushback
Knowledge creation is messy because we can only guess and eliminate error, there is no direct path to truth. Outsiders see the visible mistakes as evidence of doom. But in a dynamic society, they are not failure. Not correcting them is. We solved famine, created abundance and obesity, then weight-loss drugs. We are correcting our own error-correction institutions the same way. No guarantee we succeed. But no true barrier exists.
Lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty is a real achievement, and I don’t want to downplay what China has accomplished. Much of that success, however, rests on adopting and scaling Western-derived science, technology, and market institutions. Their system has real strengths in execution and pragmatic adaptation.
The deeper difference lies between adaptation and open-ended knowledge creation. Dynamic societies with strong traditions of criticism and fallibilism make more visible errors because they experiment at the frontier. Most guesses fail, but criticism eliminates the bad ones and allows correction without collapse. That’s how progress compounds over time. Making errors isn’t necessarily a sign of failure in a dynamic society. Not correcting them is. We can stay ahead by continuing to generate the relevant knowledge.
China’s approach is highly effective at mobilizing resources and adapting imported knowledge, but it only works as long as another player is generating the next layer of knowledge. Sustained, independent knowledge creation requires the full package: fallibilism, open criticism, and the understanding that problems are soluble.
On Western economic metrics, I largely agree with your assessment. But an abundant society that keeps creating new knowledge is remarkably resilient to rent-seeking, waste, and policy mistakes precisely because it has built-in mechanisms for error-correction. The real comparative advantage isn’t current economic output, it’s the long-term capacity to generate unbounded knowledge.
Even in dynamic societies, most people aren’t knowledge creators. But the institutions protect the space for those who are while enabling broad correction when things go wrong.
Immigration is a clear current example. Many Western countries made serious mistakes with large-scale, low-selectivity inflows. Those errors are now visible and costly. But countries with functioning error-correcting institutions can still reverse course. When they do, they’ll be more likely to have settled upon a better immigration policy (neither closed borders nor non-selective, open immigration) and in a position to capture the real benefits of values-aligned immigration.
Regarding empiricism: it has the arrow backwards. Theories come first. Observations and evidence are how we try to refute them.
How immigration policy can either undermine or support Popper’s error-correction institutions: https://t.co/XHL70Ir7nd
Karl Popper argued that the central question of politics should not be “Who should rule?” but rather: How can we design institutions that remove bad leaders and bad policies without violence?
No leader or law will be perfect, so progress comes from rapid, peaceful error-correction through criticism, debate, and elections.
David Deutsch takes this further: Do not destroy the means of error correction.
By this standard, the Democrat Party approach to immigration is undermining the very mechanisms of peaceful correction. Democrats favor open borders, low standards for citizenship, and broad government assistance (welfare, healthcare, education, cash, jobs) for newcomers, even illegals. This incentivizes large numbers of immigrants to come, receive benefits from one party, and disproportionately support that same party in elections.
The result is self-entrenchment and dilution of the electoral power of citizens, taxpayers, and those most invested in error-correction. Meanwhile, Democrats are incentivized to keep raising taxes to fund the immigrants voting for them. Without strong borders, we can’t error-correct by removing non-contributors, and it creates the possibility of a successful political strategy: using tax funds to incentivize as many immigrants as possible.
If the Democratic Party’s policies are good, they should implement them in a society that embraces criticism to test them. If they succeed, we improve on them; if not, we quickly remove them.
This isn’t about opposing all immigration. A healthy open society should want net-positive immigration that enhances knowledge, culture, and economy—provided rules support, rather than sabotage, ongoing criticism and correction.
The lesson from Popper and Deutsch is urgent: to remain stable despite constant change, an open society needs strong error-correction through non-violent means.
Cool to see Elon posting about Karl Popper.
Fallibilism and error-correction institutions make it so an open society can last indefinitely.
Immigration can be a great thing for an open society but you must judge who you let in while exclude enemies to your culture's values.
"Judging one culture objectively superior to another is a condition for progress and isn't racist."
― David Deutsch
Soros wants to end Western Civilization
Karl Popper on not being tolerant of the intolerant: https://t.co/CbqhHw8gMG
We need to discriminate. As Karl Popper warned, unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance. A society that refuses to discriminate against the intolerant will eventually be destroyed by them.
@UlisesDavid__ Si lo levantas, su seguridad es tu responsabilidad
The open society and its enemy, Soros.
While he named his Open Society Foundations after Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” his project stands as a philosophical inversion of everything Popper defended.
Popper’s open society rested on critical rationalism, the recognition that no one possesses final truth, that institutions must remain open to criticism and piecemeal reform, and that democracy functions as a method for removing rulers without bloodshed.
He rejected historicism, the belief in iron laws of history that justify sacrificing present generations for a utopian future, and warned that such thinking inevitably produces closed, authoritarian societies.
Soros has repurposed the label to advance a grand project of engineered demographic transformation.
Through mass immigration, multiculturalism as official policy, and diversity mandates that prioritize group identity over individual merit and assimilation, his foundations actively dissolve the cultural continuity and social trust that make rational criticism and incremental change possible.
Popper understood that openness requires a stable framework, a shared language of reason, basic cohesion, and institutions citizens feel they collectively own.
Soros treats those foundations as obstacles to be overcome in the name of an abstract, borderless openness.
The concrete results are visible. Parallel societies that operate under different norms, public spaces where debate on the scale and selection of immigration is treated as illegitimate, and the rise of identity based hierarchies that close off dissent in the name of equity.
These are certainly not expansions of the open society, but new forms of closure, tribal in character, enforced through institutional capture rather than overt dictatorship, yet hostile to the very critical spirit Popper placed at the center of civilized life.
Philosophically, Soros replaces Popper’s falsification and humility before reality with a new historicism, the conviction that global multiculturalism and open borders represent inevitable moral progress, and that resistance from actual existing communities constitutes the new enemy.
The machinery funded in the name of openness does not test its own assumptions against evidence, it suppresses the questions.
Those who still value the ideal of an open society should read Popper on their own terms.
They will find that Soros has not extended the open society, but has supplied its most sophisticated contemporary enemies.
“Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between stable, static societies consisting of anti-rational memes and a stable dynamic society consisting of rational memes.”
― David Deutsch
Living in such a transitional period means we will make mistakes as we try to solve our problems and make progress. The West has made lots of mistakes with allowing immigration of people who bring anti-rational memes that suppress criticism and place clan or theocratic authority above individual reason. Yet this is not evidence of inevitable doom. It is a problem to be solved.
Rational vs Anti-Rational Memes
Rational memes replicate because they are useful and true. They strengthen the more they are criticized and scrutinized, getting closer to truth over time. They promote innovation, progress, and knowledge growth and do not harm their holders.
Anti-rational memes replicate by disabling critical thinking, creativity, and error-correction. They do not need to be true or useful. They contain false explanations on the surface, but they carry deep implicit knowledge of human psychology, especially how to exploit vulnerabilities to ensure faithful transmission.
They survive by making people unwilling or unable to question them, using authority, tradition, guilt, fear, identity fusion, taboos, and — most powerfully — specific child-rearing practices.
@DuusLukas @Tesla_AI @KRoelandschap Rigid speed caps constrain speed AND the very attempts whose outcomes would show whether the cap itself is improving or worsening safety.
All understanding is created by each individual through the theories they form. Before a person develops theories that represent progress, even evidence right in front of them remains uninterpreted or static. People who measure higher on IQ tests have created better software for understanding the world.
Correlations between measured IQ and factors like ethnicity or parental background exist, but only because those factors shape the environment in which the person carries out the creative process of guessing at explanations ex nihilo.
Creativity works by forming conjectures that approximate abstractions. Criticism then tests whether those conjectures can be instantiated in reality, whether they are consistent with the laws of physics. This error-correction process is what allows new knowledge to be created that was not present in the genes or the prior environment.
"Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress.
But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.”
― David Deutsch
The Peloponnesian War might be history’s biggest “what if.” Athens’ mini-Enlightenment died with it. Imagine where we’d be now if the Enlightenment had started 2,000 years earlier.
(per @DavidDeutschOxf)
But if China is a leading innovator, where are their new ideas? Let's take your example, Shenzen. They are world leaders in drones, lithium-ion batteries, AI, high-speed rail, robotics and more. But all of these ideas originated outside of China. I don’t deny that they are innovating within existing ideas. But that is adaptation and scaling, not the generation of fundamentally new ideas which requires creative breakthroughs and unique cultural elements. The ideas were not latent and waiting to be implemented.
Creating a completely new idea ex nihilo is what the West repeatedly does: Airplanes, nuclear weapons/energy, AI, freedom of speech, trial by jury, steam engine, railroads, sewing machine, lightbulb, habeus corpus, general theory of relativity, camera, antibiotics, refrigeration, industrial-scientific revolution, quantum mechanics, weight loss drugs, modern banking and finance, computers, internet, etc. They were new ideas first thought of by a creative individual in a tradition of criticism, not historical inevitabilities.
That creative and critical process has a cultural home. It is not geography or ethnicity. It is the tradition, strongest in the post-Enlightenment West and its offshoots, that treats bold guesses and open error-correction as the normal way to make progress.
Imagine if the West had stayed static (pre-enlightenment). Would China have made the rapid advancements it has over the last few decades, or would it have continued along the slower path it followed for most of its history?
One of the best things the West has built is institutions of criticism and error correction. Even the most ambitious policies remain open to criticism and peaceful reversal.
After 1945, Britain undertook a massive experiment in democratic socialism. Similar collectivist experiments across the world led to much worse outcomes: irreversible entrenchment, suppression of dissent, economic collapse, and tyranny because error-correcting mechanisms were weak or disabled. Britain’s institutions held. The failures were acknowledged, debated, and corrected through normal democratic processes. The 1979 election and reforms reversed the most damaging elements while retaining some elements.
David Deutsch said, “If you look at the early to mid 20th century, the age of the great dictators, totalitarian ideologies were sweeping the world. And in many countries, fascists and communists took over the government and caused all sorts of damage. But I think it’s extremely significant that not one of the Anglosphere countries fell to a dictatorship.”
English-speaking democracies largely avoided the twentieth century’s worst catastrophes. They were not magically immune to bad ideas; they simply made it harder for bad ideas to become permanently entrenched. They made mistakes but were better at correcting them.
Today’s failed immigration experiment
For decades, Western countries have admitted millions whose values conflict with our values of individual rights, equality before the law, freedom of speech and criticism, secular governance, and the rejection of theocratic or clan-based authority. Assimilation, values alignment, or even basic language proficiency were disregarded. Welfare systems reduced the pressure to integrate or leave. Parallel subcultures formed that rejected and subverted our values.
This large-scale experiment has introduced many mistakes. However, the underlying institutions have not been disabled. The capacity to recognize error and change course peacefully still exists.
There is a path forward: correction our errors and enacting an immigration policy that aims to secure the benefits of healthy immigration while avoiding much of the catastrophic social erosion. Immigration should be deliberately selective for compatibility with our values, not merely economic contribution. Cultural and ideological fit is not optional. Enemies of our culture and values should be denied entry. Even then, mistakes will occur and deportation is needed to correct for individuals who’ve shown not to hold our values.
People in closed countries like China largely avoided this particular experiment and currently experience less internal friction on this dimension. But their approach carries its own costs: suppressed criticism produces brittle decision-making and slower long-term knowledge growth. We gain the benefits of immigration while they largely do not, and we are developing the knowledge of how to handle immigration, assimilate people, and keep a culture stable despite radical change.
Lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty is a real achievement, and I don’t want to downplay what China has accomplished. Much of that success, however, rests on adopting and scaling Western-derived science, technology, and market institutions. Their system has real strengths in execution and pragmatic adaptation.
The deeper difference lies between adaptation and open-ended knowledge creation. Dynamic societies with strong traditions of criticism and fallibilism make more visible errors because they experiment at the frontier. Most guesses fail, but criticism eliminates the bad ones and allows correction without collapse. That’s how progress compounds over time. Making errors isn’t necessarily a sign of failure in a dynamic society. Not correcting them is. We can stay ahead by continuing to generate the relevant knowledge.
China’s approach is highly effective at mobilizing resources and adapting imported knowledge, but it only works as long as another player is generating the next layer of knowledge. Sustained, independent knowledge creation requires the full package: fallibilism, open criticism, and the understanding that problems are soluble.
On Western economic metrics, I largely agree with your assessment. But an abundant society that keeps creating new knowledge is remarkably resilient to rent-seeking, waste, and policy mistakes precisely because it has built-in mechanisms for error-correction. The real comparative advantage isn’t current economic output, it’s the long-term capacity to generate unbounded knowledge.
Even in dynamic societies, most people aren’t knowledge creators. But the institutions protect the space for those who are while enabling broad correction when things go wrong.
Immigration is a clear current example. Many Western countries made serious mistakes with large-scale, low-selectivity inflows. Those errors are now visible and costly. But countries with functioning error-correcting institutions can still reverse course. When they do, they’ll be more likely to have settled upon a better immigration policy (neither closed borders nor non-selective, open immigration) and in a position to capture the real benefits of values-aligned immigration.
Regarding empiricism: it has the arrow backwards. Theories come first. Observations and evidence are how we try to refute them.
@wholemars Legos are pretty great too though.
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