Ada Palmer

Whenever I hear a story about, well, this is why the scientific revolution happened, this is why the international revolution happened, I'm like, but there's so many stories.

And it's just hard to figure out why this one over the other ones.

There's like, you know, a dozen other stories you could tell.

I had a previous guest, Joseph Henrich, who has this theory that the Catholic Church is breaking down these old kinship-based networks that the...

rest of the world has, and it's encouraging guilds, it's encouraging these kinds of centers where people can get together and discuss ideas.

There's probably 20 other stories you could tell.

Why this story?

As of the 16th century?

Yeah.

I mean, obviously, all the stories are...

all somewhat true, but to the extent that this is a part of the story, the idea that you're building up libraries of classics and dot, dot, dot, setting up a network of information exchange that leads us to scientific revolution.

I think the reason this feels important or salient is right now, I think a lot of people have this idea that I'm going to make AI go well by doing X thing.

And maybe some of those things work, but

It's at the same time sort of frustrating, but also funny and interesting that historically nobody has a good track record of being able to say, I will do this thing so that this huge unanticipated change in history will go my way or according to my values or according to what I value.

So last episode, Jane Street introduced a puzzle where they backdoored various LLMs and asked people to figure out what the secret trigger phrases were.

Since then, they've received a bunch of submissions.

Unfortunately, none of them have solved the problem.

And so I asked Jane Street, look, we gotta give people some kind of clue or some kind of hint, something to get them on the right track.

And Jane Street said, we'd love to, but we can't because we don't know how to find the solution either.

So you've got a puzzle in front of you that some of the smartest people in the world aren't sure how to solve.