The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1

Welcome to the eponymous novel podcast. The main topic that we started out on was timeless principles of wealth creation, and then we’ve been touching a little bit on internal happiness and peace and well-being. But I am, first and foremost, a student of science and a failed physicist, if you will. I loved physics; I wanted to pursue it, but I never felt I was going to be great at it. I was pulled into more technology, which is applied science. Nevertheless, I've remained a student of science; I remain fascinated by it, and all of my real heroes are scientists because I believe that science is the engine that pulls humanity forward.

I've been lucky to live in an age where scientific progress and technological progress seem not likely but inevitable. So we've gotten used to this idea that life always gets better, despite all the complaining that goes on about how productivity growth is stagnant. The reality is anyone who owns a smartphone or drives a car or even lives in a house has seen technology improve their quality of life over and over again. We take this progress for granted, and it's thanks to science.

So I continue to be fascinated by science. To me, science is also the study of truth. What do we know to be true? How do we know something to be true? As I get older, I find myself incapable of having an attention span for anything which is not steeped in truth.

So the background on this particular podcast series is I thought I knew a lot about science, and there was a lot about science that I took for granted, such as what scientific theory is and how scientific theories are formed. Most of us have a vague idea of it, and it can range from some people thinking science is what scientists do, which has a definitional problem, as in, what is a scientist? Other people think, well, science is making falsifiable or testable predictions, and maybe that’s closer to it. Sometimes people say, what’s the scientific method, and what is the scientific method? Then they start describing their junior high school chemistry experiment and lose the trail after that.

Especially in these days where we’re told to quote-unquote believe in science, which is an oxymoron. People respect science, but they don’t understand what science is. The idea of what science is getting hijacked sometimes by well-meaning people who want to convince you of the science, and sometimes by not so well-meaning people who just want to influence the way that you think and feel and act.

I was very pleasantly surprised a couple of years back that I reopened an old book which I had read, or I thought I’d read, about a decade ago called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Sometimes you read a book, and it makes a difference right away. Sometimes you read a book, and you don’t understand it; then you read it later at the right time, and it makes a difference.

This time when I reopened this book and I went through it much more carefully than I had in the past, meticulously rather than reading it to read it and to say I was done reading it, I read it to understand the concepts and the topics and stopped at every point where something was new. It completely started reforming my worldview. It changed the way that I think, and I would credit this book as being probably the only book in the last decade, except maybe a few of Nassim Taleb's works and maybe one or two other scatterbooks, that I feel made me smarter. They literally expanded the way that I think; they expanded not just the repertoire of my knowledge but the repertoire of my reasoning.

People throw around words like mental models a lot, and I find most mental models not worth reading, or thinking about, or listening to because I find them trivial. However, the mental models that came out of The Beginning of Infinity are transformational because they very convincingly completely change the way that you look at what is true and what is not.

Karl Popper laid out the theory of what is scientific and what is not, what is a good explanation and what is not. What Deutsch does is he expands on that dramatically in The Beginning of Infinity. But even that is to do...