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In this other world that I call “the river,” the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right. It doesn’t matter who you are; it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way.

And that’s very against the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the “indigo blob” because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media rooting for Democrats. Different parts of The New York Times have both those functions.

I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain.

You have the C.E.O. of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s a good gamble to take.

On the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, among young people in particular.

They’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex — a different type of risk tolerance.

They are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. Free speech is kind of a pro-risk take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course.

On the other hand, you have various booms and busts in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting

What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk.

it just seems to me we are in a world now where institutions are less trusted.

some people respond to that by saying, OK, I make my own rules now, and this is great and I have lots of agency.

some respond by withdrawing into an online world or clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility or just by becoming more risk averse.

you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting. One of them is Peter Thiel. What did you learn spending time with him?

There’s a good book by Max Chafkin about Peter Thiel called “The Contrarian,” which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative more than libertarian and probably quite religious.

I mean, the amounts of wealth and success and power that Silicon Valley has — I do think some people pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways, or been blessed in some ways, or maybe the nerdy version of it, think they’re living in a simulation of some kind.

Peter Thiel is a sort of template of the V.C. mind, which is oriented toward being right in important and counterintuitive ways three out of 20 times and doesn’t care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times. You want big payouts, not a high betting average.

The two things that you hear from every V.C. — one is the importance of the longer time horizons. You’re making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years.

No. 2, even more important, is the asymmetric ability to bet on the upside. They are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Sergey Brin walked through their door, and they didn’t give them funding and then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x. And so if you can only lose 1x your money, but you can make 1,000x if you have a successful company, then that changes your mind-set about everything. You want to avoid false negatives. You want to avoid missed opportunities.

There’s a bias in the world you’re describing — an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. I see this a lot in Silicon Valley. I would call it faux Bayesian reasoning, where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like you know what you’re talking abou

SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value, which is very appealing to the kinds of people you’re describing. But it can become a costume of sloppy thinking. I’m curious how you think about it.

There’s two things here. One is there is a jargon, where there’re just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies. It’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models.

Look, in some ways, these V.C.s are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people. So why do they succeed despite that?

I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, No. 1, and being willing to make these positive expected value, high-risk, but very high upside bets and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, right? Those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes, half of them, right?

I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling but in other things, too. You talk about pain tolerance, you talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips

You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics, too. There is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.

Human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high stress moments. Your body will know when you’re playing a $100, $200 game where it really matters. You will just know

You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects.

But actually your body’s providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally because it’s very related to being in the zone, like Michael Jordan used to talk about — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not

How much is that learnable, and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence that some people have and some people don’t?

I think it’s actually quite learnable

you can tone it up or tone it down. I mean, it’s terrifying the first time it happens, but when you start to recognize it and you make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit and take your time and try to execute the basics

It’s not as much about trying to be a hero. It’s about trying to execute the basics. Because if everyone is losing their [expletive], if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you’re ahead of 95 percent of the people.

is gut instinct overrated or underrated? It depends on how much experience you have. The best poker players can have uncannily good instincts based on reading physical tells, just the kind of vibe someone gives off.

I played a lot of poker in writing this book, and you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has a strong hand. And you can test it because you can say, I know that I’m supposed to fold this hand here, it’s a little bit too weak to call against a bluff, but I just have a sense that he’s bluffing. And lo and behold, you’re right, more often than you think.

in general what he argues is that if you take a look at animal cognition, human too, it's computational systems. Therefore, you want to look the units of computation. Think about a Turing machine, say, which is the simplest form of computation, you have to find units that have properties like "read", "write" and "address." That's the minimal computational unit, so you got to look in the brain for those. You're never going to find them if you look for strengthening of synaptic connections or field properties, and so on. You've got to start by looking for what's there and what's working and you see that from Marr's highest level.

it's basically in the spirit of Marr's analysis. So when you're studying vision, he argues, you first ask what kind of computational tasks is the visual system carrying out. And then you look for an algorithm that might carry out those computations and finally you search for mechanisms of the kind that would make the algorithm work. Otherwise, you may never find anything.

"Good Old Fashioned AI," as it's labeled now, made strong use of formalisms in the tradition of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, mathematical logic for example, or derivatives of it, like nonmonotonic reasoning and so on. It's interesting from a history of science perspective that even very recently, these approaches have been almost wiped out from the mainstream and have been largely replaced -- in the field that calls itself AI now -- by probabilistic and statistical models. My question is, what do you think explains that shift and is it a step in the right direction?

AI and robotics got to the point where you could actually do things that were useful, so it turned to the practical applications and somewhat, maybe not abandoned, but put to the side, the more fundamental scientific questions, just caught up in the success of the technology and achieving specific goals.

The approximating unanalyzed data kind is sort of a new approach, not totally, there's things like it in the past. It's basically a new approach that has been accelerated by the existence of massive memories, very rapid processing, which enables you to do things like this that you couldn't have done by hand. But I think, myself, that it is leading subjects like computational cognitive science into a direction of maybe some practical applicability... ..in engineering? Chomsky: ...But away from understanding.

I was very skeptical about the original work. I thought it was first of all way too optimistic, it was assuming you could achieve things that required real understanding of systems that were barely understood, and you just can't get to that understanding by throwing a complicated machine at it.

if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it's way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth. But you won't get the kind of understanding that the sciences have always been aimed at -- what you'll get at is an approximation to what's happening.

Suppose you want to predict tomorrow's weather. One way to do it is okay I'll get my statistical priors, if you like, there's a high probability that tomorrow's weather here will be the same as it was yesterday in Cleveland, so I'll stick that in, and where the sun is will have some effect, so I'll stick that in, and you get a bunch of assumptions like that, you run the experiment, you look at it over and over again, you correct it by Bayesian methods, you get better priors. You get a pretty good approximation of what tomorrow's weather is going to be. That's not what meteorologists do -- they want to understand how it's working. And these are just two different concepts of what success means, of what achievement is.

if you get more and more data, and better and better statistics, you can get a better and better approximation to some immense corpus of text, like everything in The Wall Street Journal archives -- but you learn nothing about the language.

the right approach, is to try to see if you can understand what the fundamental principles are that deal with the core properties, and recognize that in the actual usage, there's going to be a thousand other variables intervening -- kind of like what's happening outside the window, and you'll sort of tack those on later on if you want better approximations, that's a different approach.

take a concrete example of a new field in neuroscience, called Connectomics, where the goal is to find the wiring diagram of very complex organisms, find the connectivity of all the neurons in say human cerebral cortex, or mouse cortex. This approach was criticized by Sidney Brenner, who in many ways is [historically] one of the originators of the approach. Advocates of this field don't stop to ask if the wiring diagram is the right level of abstraction -- maybe it's no

if you went to MIT in the 1960s, or now, it's completely different. No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it. But that's a very different approach. And it resulted maybe from the fact that really for the first time in history, the basic sciences, like physics, had something really to tell engineers. And besides, technologies began to change very fast, so not very much point in learning the technologies of today if it's going to be different 10 years from now. So you have to learn the fundamental science that's going to be applicable to whatever comes along next. And the same thing pretty much happened in medicine.

that's the kind of transition from something like an art, that you learn how to practice -- an analog would be trying to match some data that you don't understand, in some fashion, maybe building something that will work -- to science, what happened in the modern period, roughly Galilean science.

it turns out that there actually are neural circuits which are reacting to particular kinds of rhythm, which happen to show up in language, like syllable length and so on. And there's some evidence that that's one of the first things that the infant brain is seeking -- rhythmic structures. And going back to Gallistel and Marr, its got some computational system inside which is saying "okay, here's what I do with these things" and say, by nine months, the typical infant has rejected -- eliminated from its repertoire -- the phonetic distinctions that aren't used in its own language.

people like Shimon Ullman discovered some pretty remarkable things like the rigidity principle. You're not going to find that by statistical analysis of data. But he did find it by carefully designed experiments. Then you look for the neurophysiology, and see if you can find something there that carries out these computations. I think it's the same in language, the same in studying our arithmetical capacity, planning, almost anything you look at. Just trying to deal with the unanalyzed chaotic data is unlikely to get you anywhere, just like as it wouldn't have gotten Galileo anywhere.

with regard to cognitive science, we're kind of pre-Galilean, just beginning to open up the subject

You can invent a world -- I don't think it's our world -- but you can invent a world in which nothing happens except random changes in objects and selection on the basis of external forces. I don't think that's the way our world works, I don't think it's the way any biologist thinks it is. There are all kind of ways in which natural law imposes channels within which selection can take place, and some things can happen and other things don't happen. Plenty of things that go on in the biology in organisms aren't like this. So take the first step, meiosis. Why do cells split into spheres and not cubes? It's not random mutation and natural selection; it's a law of physics. There's no reason to think that laws of physics stop there, they work all the way through. Well, they constrain the biology, sure. Chomsky: Okay, well then it's not just random mutation and selection. It's random mutation, selection, and everything that matters, like laws of physics.

What I think is valuable is the history of science. I think we learn a lot of things from the history of science that can be very valuable to the emerging sciences. Particularly when we realize that in say, the emerging cognitive sciences, we really are in a kind of pre-Galilean stage. We don't know wh

at we're looking for anymore than Galileo did, and there's a lot to learn from that.

No test is perfectly accurate; all generate false positives and false negatives. How many varies by the test — the new Abbott Labs test, for example, has a false negative rate of about 3 percent and a false positive rate of about 1.5 percent.

We’d also require public understanding that test results are a risk-assessment tool rather than a definitive answer. And shifting the public’s thinking might be harder than shifting Trump.

Doing that would also require fundamentally changing our thinking.

For mass testing to work, people will need to understand that even an event where all attendees just tested negative isn’t necessarily covid-free, because some false negatives might have slipped through

Giving hundreds of millions of citizens this crash course in elementary statistics would be very difficult. Teaching people how to think about a positive result would be even harder — especially if mass testing does its job of reducing caseloads. Because as case numbers fall, false positives will become a bigger and bigger problem.

Say we’re testing 200 people, 10 of whom have covid-19. Given its rate of false negatives, the Abbott test would probably catch all 10. But with false positives, it could also tell one or two people who don’t have covid-19 that they’re infected. That’s not ideal — as good citizens, they’d have to go home and quarantine. But a more sensitive follow-up test could substantially mitigate this problem, shortening such quarantines to a day or so. It would be worth it to get those 10 true positives out of circulation.

Doing this, we might eventually reduce the share of the population that’s infected to, say, 0.5 percent from 5 percent. Unfortunately, the false positive rate won’t budge, so now for every one true positive uncovered, roughly three false positives would still be generated.

That’s inherently costly: Every false positive means skipping your flight, rehearsal or birthday party. But it would be catastrophic if people didn’t understand that a positive covid-19 test is a guideline, not a guarantee

People who think that they’ve had covid-19, when they haven’t, are apt to go out and engage in risky behavior, maybe a lot of it. And if mass testing ever becomes common, there could be a lot of those people.

So mass testing isn’t just a matter of getting a test that is cheap enough and plentiful enough; the administration and the public must be educated to use this bounty wisely. That’s a hard messaging problem. Given the alternative, though, it’s the kind of problem we’d really like to have.

The teams with training that engaged in probabilistic thinking performed best. The training involved learning some of the lessons included in Daniel Kahneman’s great work, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” For example, they were taught to alternate between taking the inside view and the outside view.

Most important, participants were taught to turn hunches into probabilities. Then they had online discussions with members of their team adjusting the probabilities, as often as every day

In these discussions, hedgehogs disappeared and foxes prospered. That is, having grand theories about, say, the nature of modern China was not useful. Being able to look at a narrow question from many vantage points and quickly readjust the probabilities was tremendously useful.

In the second year of the tournament, Tetlock and collaborators skimmed off the top 2 percent of forecasters across experimental conditions, identifying 60 top performers and randomly assigning them into five teams of 12 each. These “super forecasters” also delivered a far-above-average performance in Year 2. Apparently, forecasting skill cannot only be taught, it can be replicated.

He believes that this kind of process may help depolarize politics. If you take Republicans and Democrats and ask them to make a series of narrow predictions, they’ll have to put aside their grand notions and think clearly about the imminently falsifiable.

Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin

. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.

The discovery of natural selection, by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, must itself be counted as an extraordinary philosophical advance

The concept of natural selection had remarkable power for explaining directional and adaptive changes. Its nature is simplicity itself. It is not a force like the forces described in the laws of physics; its mechanism is simply the elimination of inferior individuals

A diverse population is a necessity for the proper working of natural selection

Because of the importance of variation, natural selection should be considered a two-step process: the production of abundant variation is followed by the elimination of inferior individuals

By adopting natural selection, Darwin settled the several-thousandyear- old argument among philosophers over chance or necessity. Change on the earth is the result of both, the first step being dominated by randomness, the second by necessity

Another aspect of the new philosophy of biology concerns the role of laws. Laws give way to concepts in Darwinism. In the physical sciences, as a rule, theories are based on laws; for example, the laws of motion led to the theory of gravitation. In evolutionary biology, however, theories are largely based on concepts such as competition, female choice, selection, succession and dominance. These biological concepts, and the theories based on them, cannot be reduced to the laws and theories of the physical sciences

Despite the initial resistance by physicists and philosophers, the role of contingency and chance in natural processes is now almost universally acknowledged. Many biologists and philosophers deny the existence of universal laws in biology and suggest that all regularities be stated in probabilistic terms, as nearly all so-called biological laws have exceptions. Philosopher of science Karl Popper’s famous test of falsification therefore cannot be applied in these cases.

To borrow Darwin’s phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been, and are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles