Dwarkesh Patel

In the future, the AIs are coming up with the next version of this kind of unifying concept.

And how would you identify it among millions of papers which might actually constitute progress, but which have much less general unifying ideas?

Yeah.

it seems often in the history of science, when a new theory comes up that in retrospect we realize is correct, it seems to make implications that just either make no sense because they're wrong, and we realize later on why they're wrong, or they're correct but seem wildly implausible at the time.

So as you talked about, Aristarchus had heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC, and then...

ancient athenians were like this can't be because it would if the earth is going around the sun we should see the relative position of the stars change as we're going around the sun and the only way that wouldn't be the case is if they're so far away that um that you don't notice any parallax which is actually the correct implication but there's times when actually the implication isn't correct and we just need to graduate to a better level of understanding so leibniz would

you know, chide Newton and disagree with Newton's theory of gravity on the basis that it implied action at a distance.

And then there's, we don't know the mechanism.

And Newton himself was sort of stunned that inertial mass and gravitational mass were the same quantity.

So all these things which were resolved by Einstein.

Yes, yes.

But it was still progress.

And so the question for a system of peer review for AI would be, even if you can falsify a theory, how would you notice that it still constitutes progress relative to the thing before?

Yeah, so it...

There's actually...

Brings up a topic I've been very curious about.

So you mentioned Darwin's theory of evolution.

There's this book, The Clockwork Universe, by Edward Dahlnack, which covers a lot of this era of history we're talking about.

And he has this interesting observation in there that the origin of species is published in 1859.

The Principia Mathematica is published in 1687.