Adam Kucharski

kind of interesting was how many mathematicians were deeply influenced by religion.

So Newton, for example, Isaac Newton driving all these equations and theories about planets and planetary motion, he saw that it was God keeping the universe in balance.

And he was essentially just observing divine influence.

So for him, although he was doing a lot of this scientific work, he saw that there was this external influence keeping it all in place along the way.

So even quite far through history, you had these kind of other beliefs

baseline explanations going on I think even in the modern era I think the way the way sometimes we tell the story of science I think is sometimes almost a bit disingenuous if you read a scientific paper it's kind of yeah there's this problem and I decided to run this experiment and I got these results but I think there's also just that element of like why what was the hunch that made you think that that might be an interesting thing to investigate what was that spark of inspiration I think even

In this era of AI, it's a really interesting question because AI can kind of process and mimic human decisions as we write them down.

But I think there's often that kind of spark or that idea that would lead you to do something that just people wouldn't have tried before.

And that's much, much harder to articulate.

So it's not necessarily that kind of obviousness that we might have had in another era.

But I think there still are those things which are quite hard to explain in where that evidence might have initially sparked from.

It's a really interesting question about how different societies have even set that balance.

Essentially, in a legal case, there's two main errors you can make.

Someone can be guilty and you can let them go free, or they can be innocent and you can convict them.

William Blackstone, who was a legal scholar in the 1760s, came up with what's known as Blackstone's ratio.

He said it's better for 10 guilty people to go free than one innocent to be convicted.

And Benjamin Franklin actually was even more cautious.

He said it's better for 100 guilty people to go free than for one innocent to be convicted, seeing that as a kind of balance.

Cultures, particularly some communist regimes in the 20th century, set it the other way.

It was better for 10 innocents to be imprisoned than one guilty to go free because there's this kind of trade-off from where they're seeing it as the worst error.