Find the interview here. I was surprised to hear Ned Hall referring to predictive systems as a patch of truth. I am skeptical about this framing which I will get into shortly. As a preliminary aside, Newton thought some wacky things about what space is, and what forces are. This led Hume and Berkely to make some equally wacky claims about forces and space. Worth looking into if anyone is interested. Anyway, this conversation made me think about what we're doing when we do science. I am skeptical of the suggestion that what we are doing is something like "bootstrapping towards the truth" or finding "patches of truth." I say this and my STEM friends immediately get very defensive, but I don't think they need to. A "good" prediction comes apart from what's "true" basically immediately, Newton of course being a prime example. Newton made excellent predictions in the sense that they allow us to do a great many useful things, without corresponding to what we now think is metaphysically true. So it doesn't look to me like the goal is truth, but rather something much more pragmatic. I think this came up during the interview, but I would have been interested to hear more of Alyssa's thoughts, as a scientist, about what is truth and what relationship science has to it. I do think the pragmatic type of program is very unpopular, and there are certainly good reasons to think it is wrong, and that science really is discovering objective truths. For my part I am not so sure either way.

I learned about the existence of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As Professor Goodman and Lord Rees noted, the youth tend to be pretty pessimistic about the shape of things, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the wikipedia page for the IAEA doesn't have a controversies tab, and the criticism section is relatively very mild. So it is rather hopeful that there's this fairly successful international regulatory agency. Of course not to the degree of mobilizing all of humanity in the saving of ourselves from climate change. I do appreciate the bright spot, though I fear later that I will mention the International Atomic Energy Agency to someone and they'll tell me how it's a CIA psy-op or colonialism or designed to prevent some specific people from having nuclear power. There's that characteristic youthful pessimism. In that same vein I wish Martin Rees would have been more forthcoming with regards to how we redistribute wealth. Also, why are so many of the people most concerned with the future (e.g. "longtermists," the effective altruism movement, Nick Bostrom) seemingly relatively unconcerned about pressing problems right now? What is the principle motivating our attitude towards the future? For Martin Rees, what ought to be the underlying principles which guide us through the coming turbulent decades?

The most surprising bit of information I learned from the interview is that 30% of energy use is spent on transport and 50% is used for space heating. 50% for heating space feels absolutely enormous. It is mostly not particularly cold in the UK. I looked it up and the lowest average temperature is never below freezing. Not to say people shouldn't be heating their spaces, but 50% seems tremendous. I wish there had been a more specific breakdown, how much of that is rail vs cars vs whatever else? If I had conducted the interview, I would have asked some more questions about the system that produced planned obsolescence for LED lights started selling paper straws as a solution for climate change. The conversation is a political one inherently, and I think it's risky to not acknowledge that and ask explicitly political questions. Is the economic system we have sustainable? Ask people that. What's the most impactful change is a good question for sure, but I think to get a real answer to that you need to ask more specific questions. People don't want to say we have to radically reorient our lives. Do we?