Why Conjecture Magazine?
“A preoccupation with pursuing growth — or some modified version of the growth ideal — therefore means a preoccupation with ideas, a preoccupation with cultivating human reason, and a preoccupation with the notion that man should realize, perfect, and extend his nature as a generator of powerful ideas that can change the world.” — Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments
Powerful ideas are the wellspring of progress, and an understanding of how to nurture such ideas should be at the center of our moral and intellectual engagements. Economist Tyler Cowen has spearheaded the launch of numerous websites, podcasts, and other projects examining the nature of progress, if and why it has been slowing recently, and what changes can be made to revitalize it. Conjecture Magazine is another such venture.
What makes Conjecture Magazine different? It’s how we view knowledge.
To understand progress is to understand what knowledge is and how it is created. Most thinkers will readily agree, but they nonetheless harbor serious misconceptions about how we know what we know. Chief among them is the idea that one should adopt all and only those positions that can be justified by evidence. Once we have a sufficient amount of evidence, and once it is stripped of its cognitive and statistical biases by appropriately humble and rigorous researchers, then the truth will have been made manifest. This justificationism is the fatal error of conventional thinking on knowledge.
Conjecture Magazine explicitly rejects this justificationism and instead takes its inspiration from the philosopher Karl Popper. Although Popper is best known for his falsifiability criterion — his claim that a statement can be considered scientific only if it can be falsified — it is his lesser known general theory of knowledge-discovery that is so lamentably absent from our understanding of progress.
Popper held a commonsense definition of knowledge as consisting of explanations that solve problems. Explanations hold primacy over the weight of the evidence. After all, how can we determine how much the evidence weighs without first applying a theory to explain it? And good explanations are literally synonymous with progress, as problem solutions beget even better problems in a virtuous cycle that drives ever more understanding, wellbeing and prosperity.
Although Popper’s view of knowledge was practical, his theory of knowledge growth was radical. How do we solve problems? Guessing and testing, creativity and criticism, conjecture and refutation. We draw on our unique faculty of creativity to guess at an explanation, and then we devise tests to see if this explanation can be refuted.
It seems preposterous to summarize much of epistemology in so simple a formulation. However, biological evolution can be similarly summarized as variation and selection. In fact, evolution is a genetic form of conjecture and refutation. Popper saw knowledge creation as not just analogous to evolution, but literally as an offshoot of it. In this view, creativity drives knowledge growth as much as mutation drives evolution.
Popper’s theory of knowledge was born in the philosophy of science, but it applies to all fields of human endeavor, and creativity is always the centerpiece. The creativity of Einstein operated in the same way as it did for Beethoven — both were guessing at solutions to a problem (how to explain gravity, how to represent a pleasing melody). And both criticized their guesses, first within their own minds, and then among a community of thinkers and artists. The guesses that best survive criticism constitute our most beautiful works of art, our most just moral theories, and our most free structures of government. Our goal is always to show how our best guesses are false, rather than to calculate their likelihood of being true. That in turn drives new rounds of conjecture and criticism that ever deepen our understanding. That is the recipe for progress.
There are several profound conclusions from this approach that are lost on the conventional view. Conjecture Magazine gives these and other points the attention they deserve, all the while hoping to place progress studies on firmer epistemological footing.
- Big budget research programs that aim to manufacture science stifle creative exploration and bury actual discoveries under mountains of mass produced studies. This could explain the mismatch between government spending on research and declining productivity.
- Learning is creative exploration. Brains are not buckets into which schools and societies can pour knowledge. This could explain not only why schools fail, but why they are immoral.
- Social media has not ushered in a post-truth era because there was never a period of truthfulness. Instead, digital media have enabled more points of criticism and avenues for conjecture.
- Climate change, like all existential risk, is a race between disaster and our ability to grow the requisite knowledge. Efforts to ban or enforce behavior change can tip the balance against solutions.
- Artificial intelligence cannot become a general intelligence until we discover what creativity is. And, unlike a paperclip maximizer, a fully creative AGI would be open to persuasion like any moral human.
- Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder — the finished piece of art is almost always better than the draft because it has survived more rounds of creativity and criticism. Like science, there are criteria and principles of beauty waiting to be discovered once the rank relativism of art criticism is abandoned.
- The Effective Altruism movement is a big step forward, but their reliance on utilitarian calculations and moral prescriptions fails to account for the incalculable and unpredictable value of new ideas.
- Beliefs can never be justified, and neither can the rule of leaders, even by the will of the people. The peaceful removal of bad leaders and policies is more important than optimizing the selection of the best ones, such as ranked choice or plurality voting.
- Personal growth requires open discovery, yet willpower and self-discipline stifle exploration, and thereby hamstring growth.
- Knowledge growth is inherently unknowable. Therefore, predictions about systems that can be impacted by knowledge creation are flawed.
Nothing is worse than a group of true-believers championing an intellectual savior and denigrating all other points of view. To the contrary, we celebrate criticism, especially of our own ideas, and open the door to an intellectual space where criticism is a mark of courtesy and respect.
We are looking for writers (we pay). We are looking for readers. Progress can’t wait.
