David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

This is one of the rare lectures which had a profound influence on my way of thinking. David Deutsch has an amazing capacity of spotting and presenting complex philosophical and scientific ideas. He's a true genius!

His book the 'beginning of infinity' is must read. This talk is a great summary, but no substitute.

Ah the good old days of avant garde TED, not the BS self marketing, coachy, cheap spirituality and word saladery that we get in TED nowadays.

I come here every once in a while, always enlightening.

"That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It is a fact that is, itself, unseen yet impossible to vary."

This guy has been blowing my mind ever since his interview on Closer to Truth.

The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress. David Deutsch

Deutsch is easily the most consequential and insightful thinkers I have heard in decades. I listen to people with incredibly half-baked grand theories, like Yuval Harari for example, and I am saved from being taken in by applying the ideas of Deutsch.

"They're saying that our opinions are caused by wizards - and presumably, so are their own." Best line.

Please understand something: This man is one of the most brilliant thinkers of the modern era, despite being far less well known. In his various works, he presents a wholistic way of understanding the universe as it is currently known, from a basic level of core principles and patterns that can be seen in all aspects of human existence. I highly reccoment The Fabric of Reality and the Beginning of Infinity. They can be a bit hard to comprehend but if you take the time to read them they will genuinely make you a smarter human being.

His book "the Fabric of Reality" is brilliant. I'm reading it now.

00:00 00:18 Wondering in terms of things unseen. 01:57 The world never improved, nothing new was learned. 03:49 What had changed that made the difference between stagnation and rapid open-ended discovery? 06:21 Empiricism: Knowledge comes from the senses, not mathematics 08:21 No one’s ever seen evolution, we see rocks. 09:37 Testable conjectures are common in myths. 11:17 What is a bad explanation? 12:55 What makes the difference between good explanations and bad explanations.

David's video jarred me into the reality of how hooked I am on entertaining communication. A dearth of chuckles, zero tricks and not one metanoic moment created so much inner head noise I could hardly hear what he was saying. Regardless, I really appreciate the ideas and concepts. Thanks David & TED!

The clarity of a well trained critical thinker, is mostly based on a good inner Ego control. If you can learn to accept you know soo little since you can see so little with your inmediate senses, you will start to use a more disciplined and critical way of analysizing the reality around you hence training your mind to work coherently.

16:13 - “That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It’s a fact that is itself unseen, yet impossible to vary.” — David Deutsch, A new way to explain explanation (2009 TED Talk) [16:13]

Search for better explanations is the key for humanity to move forward.

This is very articulate, he does a good job explaining how things are correctly explained.

old teds had so much meaning

this should have 7 billion views

I love it !!! "Progress depends on rejecting authority..."