Adam Becker > Quotes

“The stories that science tells about the world filter out into the wider culture, changing the way that we look at the world around us and our place in it. The discovery that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Big Bang and an expanding universe nearly 14 billion years old, containing hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars—these ideas have radically altered humanity’s conception of itself.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Science, done right, works hard to respect absolutely no authority at all other than experience and empirical data. It never succeeds entirely, but it comes closer and has a better track record than any other method we apes have found for learning about the world around us.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Nonetheless, the appeal of Copenhagen makes some sense, seen in this light. Quantum physics drove much of the technological and scientific progress of the past ninety years: nuclear power, modern computers, the Internet. Quantum-driven medical imaging changed the face of health care; quantum imaging techniques at smaller scales have revolutionized biology and kicked off the entirely new field of molecular genetics. The list goes on. Make some kind of personal peace with Copenhagen, and contribute to this amazing revolution in science . . . or take quantum physics seriously, and come face-to-face with a problem that even Einstein couldn't solve. Shutting up never looked so good.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“mundane things are composed of a galaxy of the unfamiliar.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Philosophy has an image problem. Philosophers are thought to be mystics, religious figures, bullshit artists—anything divorced from reality... Why is philosophy held in such contempt by many physicists? ... one part of the answer probably lies in the split between the two major branches of modern Western philosophy, Analytic and Continental philosophy.

Continental philosophers tend to be much more suspicious of scientific claims about knowledge and truth than are their analytic colleagues.

Yet the distinction between the two kinds of philosophy is not apparent from a distance—most scientists have never heard of the analytic-Continental divide.

So, given that most of the highly visible philosophers in the public sphere today are Continental, and given the attitude that some (not all) Continental philosophers have toward science, it’s not terribly surprising that scientists often have disdain for all philosophers, and sometimes even think that they can do philosophy better than the philosophers can.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“That same century witnessed the longest period of psychotic denial of this deep logical problem right at the center of this whole project!”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“I don’t believe a word of the whole thing,” said Heisenberg upon hearing the news. “I don’t believe it has anything to do with uranium.” Hahn jeered, “If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second raters. Poor old Heisenberg.” After they heard the BBC report the news in great detail later that night, Heisenberg and the others accepted the truth: they had been beaten. Over the next few days, Heisenberg attempted to work out how his project had fallen so far behind; his fumbling calculations show that he had never really understood how to even build a bomb in the first place, though he had certainly thought he’d understood it. And the bickering of the other scientists at Farm Hall confirmed what documents captured by Alsos had already suggested: the Nazi bomb program, unlike the Manhattan Project, was a disorganized mess, with vital information compartmentalized and no clear vision of how to proceed. Yet, in those same few days, the Farm Hall transcripts make it clear that Heisenberg and his student, Carl von Weizsäcker, purposefully constructed a revisionist narrative of their wartime activities. According to them, while the Americans had built a weapon of death and destruction on unprecedented scales, they, the Germans, had deliberately pursued only a nuclear reactor, being unwilling to build a massive new weapon for Hitler’s Reich—thereby placing the responsibility for their failure on their supposed moral clarity, rather than their sheer incompetence.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“I expect that the Copenhagen interpretation will some time be called the greatest sophism in the history of science,” he wrote to Wheeler in 1980, “but I would consider it a terrible injustice if—when some day a solution should be found—some people claim that ‘this is of course what Bohr always meant,’ only because he was sufficiently vague.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Heisenberg repeated his story about the German bomb program to anyone who would listen for the rest of his life. Goudsmit, who had access to the Farm Hall reports and had seen the pathetic remnants of the Nazi nuclear program firsthand, knew Heisenberg’s story was a fabrication. But, with the existence of the Farm Hall transcripts itself classified, Goudsmit could state only that Heisenberg was lying, without explaining how he knew. The first popular account of the Manhattan Project, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, written by the Swiss journalist Robert Jungk in 1958, repeated Heisenberg’s story almost verbatim. So did The Virus House, the first book dedicated solely to the history of the German bomb program, which relied heavily on interviews from Heisenberg and his fellow former Farm Hall detainees. (The author, David Irving, was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier.)”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“In accordance with his wishes, his family had him cremated, and left his ashes out with the trash.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Everett thought that measurement, as presented in von Neumann’s textbook, was “a ‘magic’ process in which something quite drastic [occurs] (collapse of the wave function), while in all other times systems [are] assumed to obey perfectly natural continuous laws.” Measurement shouldn’t be fundamentally different from other physical processes. And even worse, according to Everett, von Neumann’s approach doesn’t even tell you what measurements are. If a measurement only happens when someone looks at a system, who, in particular, has to look? Everett argued that this line of reasoning leads inevitably to solipsism—the idea that you are the only being in the universe, and everyone else is somehow illusory or secondary, existing in states of indeterminate reality until you, the High Arbiter of Wave Function Collapse, deign to observe them. In his thesis, Everett admitted that this is an internally consistent view, but that “one must feel uneasy when, for example, writing textbooks on quantum mechanics, describing [wave function collapse], for the consumption of other persons to whom it does not apply.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Yet if Ellis and Silk had bothered to engage in such a dialogue before writing their editorial, they would have learned that Popper’s work hasn’t been taken seriously by philosophers of science for decades, and with good reason. The idea that falsifiability marks the boundary of science is vulnerable to the same arguments that made the verification theory of meaning untenable,”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“This promise of a benevolent godhead, a superintelligent AI that foresees and solves all human problems, is the same goal that the singularitarians and the rationalists have: the reduction of all problems to judicious application of computer science. More broadly, it's the dream of technology as salvation from all threats. Technology doesn't solve social and political problems, any more than it causes them. The prospect of nuclear war was made possible through technology, but it's a live concern because of geopolitics. Humans could come together and choose to rid the world of nuclear weapons, just as we could some together to end global warming. Applying more intelligence and technology to these problems won't solve them; they're fundamentally political.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Michael Hendricks, a neurobiologist at McGill University, is even more blunt. "What's being done now in the commercial cryonics industry is garbage. They're making puddles of pink mush in a liquid nitrogen tank. It's nothing that could ever be used for anything," he tells me. While it might eventually be possible to chill living people to a temperature near freezing and keep them in a kind of hibernation state, Hendricks says that "when you get into people who have died, and then the cryonic people show up with their head saws—it's too late by the time you get in there with a saw. The tissue starts breaking down, and importantly, it's pretty fast.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“Shut up and calculate!” certainly doesn’t sound appealing if you’re not mathematically inclined. But, even if you’re a physicist, what’s the virtue in shutting up and calculating? Mermin himself provided the answer in his 1989 article. “It is a fact about the quantum theory of paramount importance which ought to be emphasized in every popular and semi-popular exposition, that it permits us to calculate measurable quantities with unprecedented precision.” Quantum physics works. The calculations enabled by the theory are astonishing in their range of applicability and the accuracy of their results. Quantum physics tells us how long it will take to heat up your frying pan to cook your eggs and how large a dying white dwarf star can be without collapsing. It reveals the exact shape of the double helix at the core of life, it tells us the age of the immortal cattle on the rock walls at Lascaux, it speaks of atoms split beneath the stone heart of Africa eons before Oppenheimer and the blinding light of Trinity. It predicts with uncanny accuracy the precise darkness of the blackest night. It shows us the history of the universe in a handful of dust. If shutting up is the price of doing these calculations, then pass the ball gag and break out the graph paper.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“Ord ultimately concludes that human civilization has a good chance to survive even at double that temperature rise. "I looked at these models up to about 20 degrees of warming, and it still seems like there would be substantial habitable areas," he said. "But, it's something where it'd be very bad, just to be clear to the audience," Ord hastened to add.
     Climate science suggests that "very bad" is a gross understatement. "A temperature rise of 10 degrees [Celsius] would be a mass extinction event in the long term," says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and an expert on climate-induced civilizational collapse.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“We have a logarithmic view of history because we can't possibly learn and retain everything that ever happened before we were born.
     Seen through this lens, Kurzweil's trends become more suspect. It seems likely that he's confusing a logarithmic view of history for an exponential trend in biological and technological development. His list of biological milestones give this away: rather than picking particularly important events in the evolution of all life on Earth, he's mostly chosen milestones leading up to the evolution of humans, as if humans are the ultimate goal of evolution. (Evolution has no goal, as Kurzweil surely knows.) This kind of cherry-picking makes it easy to create the appearance of an exponential trend.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“It’s rather breathtaking to see an Oxford ethics professor state that the danger over the next century from an ill-defined hypothetical technology is fifty times greater than the danger posed by global warming and nuclear weapons combined. But Ord isn’t even the only person matching that description who works in that building. In What We Owe the Future”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“future” that he is alluding to goes well beyond that. Transhumanism is the belief that we can and should use advanced technology to transform ourselves”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“If humanity’s energy usage continues to grow by a more modest 2.3 percent per year”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“Moreover, unlike the hypothetical paper clip–maximizing AI, human intelligence is not centered on the optimization of fixed goals; instead, a person’s goals are formed through complex integration of innate needs and the social and cultural environment that supports their intelligence.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“Kathy Forth, a writer and data scientist in training, alleged that multiple members of the rationalist and EA communities had sexually abused her. “I could leave rationality, effective altruism and programming to escape the male-dominated environments that increase my sexual violence risk so much. The trouble is, I wouldn’t be myself,” she wrote. “What I need is to be alive and flourishing in my own skin, not just going through the motions, trapped in my body, with my mind on mute for the rest of my life. If I can’t even have myself, no one can.” After writing that note in 2018, Kathy Forth killed herself. She was thirty-seven years old.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“I have won this lottery, it’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space,” Jeff Bezos said in 2017. “We need to build reusable rockets, and that is what Blue Origin is dedicated to… taking my Amazon lottery winnings and dedicating [them] to [that].… It’s a passion, but it’s also important.”52 Don’t look at the horrifying labor conditions at the local Amazon fulfillment center. Look at the shiny rocket instead. Ignore the problems of this world. Everything will be better in space.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“harm. But an obsessively quantitative focus on ultimate outcomes is implicit in the evaluation of risks that Ord and MacAskill have both pushed, which ranks AI alignment above addressing global warming. Global warming will disproportionately affect poor people of color. But to the longtermists, any problem that promises an outcome short of full extinction isn’t as important as something that could wipe out the entire species, even if the former is real and present and the latter is purely hypothetical. If we disregard calamities that fall short of full extinction, wide swaths of human culture and diversity will be lost forever, eternally absent from the longtermists’ glorious future in space. Who gets to decide what makes the cut? The entire EA movement, and especially longtermism, has a very specific idea of what matters. By looking only at what they consider most important, they ignore the other needs and problems in the world, all while claiming they’re saving the species.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“The idea that something as pervasive and central as the Copenhagen interpretation might be dominant for 'accidental' nonscientific reasons can be scary, especially for people who have devoted their entire lives to physics.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“It's rather breathtaking to see an Oxford ethics professor state that the danger over the next century from an ill-defined hypothetical technology is fifty times greater than the danger posed by global warming and nuclear weapons combined.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“It’s an echo of the tech-first libertarian attitude among the Extropians. There are also echoes of it in the views of a certain venture capitalist who backed MIRI”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“The debates about evolution, global warming, and homeopathy have been explicitly manufactured and funded by a variety of corporate, religious, and political entities from outside science, who are not in the least interested in the quest to divorce our human biases from our understanding of the world. They are not committed to taking the science seriously and are instead devoted to taking their own aims and giving them a thin patina of scientific respectability, enough to justify their claims to equal or greater validity than the existing and overwhelming scientific consensus. These groups are not interested in examining the data and happily reject it when it does not meet their preordained conclusions, inventing new “data” to suit their purposes. In the cases of global warming and evolution, these “controversies” were invented to push back against a perceived political agenda on the part of science and scientists. And the forces behind intelligent design and climate change denial were not wrong about that—science is political, and always has been, in that it informs decisions about the best policies in the public sphere, as well it should. And science certainly is a threat to the institutions pushing these antiscience agendas. Science will always be a political threat to some institutions, simply by virtue of its attempts to respect no authority other than data and logic. So much the worse for those institutions. And that’s another sign that these “debates” are not like the debate over quantum foundations—because those working against the scientific consensus are allied with (and often funded by) groups that are simply against the idea of science itself, like some fundamentalist religious groups.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics