Matt Sornson

Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better. There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it, and also ... See more

The Enlightenment showed us progress is both achievable and desirable. It instituted a culture of Conjecture and Criticism, the two key components for any kind of rapid progress across any discipline from Science to Morality.Science is the practice of finding Good Explanations, statements about what is there, what it does, and how and why. Morality... See more

Knowledge creating entities (aka People) can exist almost anywhere in the universe. With the right knowledge People could feasibly create an ideally suited environment in an empty area of space by hoovering up and transmuting hydrogen atoms into a space-station.Technology, once created, is automatic. We will not have to think about vacuums or the c... See more

We have made virtually no Progress over the vast majority of human history. Only recently (mostly since the European Enlightenment) has progress been discernible inside a human lifetime.

Good Explanations objectively differ from Bad Explanations because they are Hard to vary. Explanations are inherently error prone (see Fallibilism) which is why we need Criticism and Error Correction. Explanations can have unbounded Reach (i.e. apply to solve unforeseen problems).

Must progress come to an end – either in catastrophe or in some sort of completion – or is it unbounded? The answer is the latter. That unboundedness is the ‘infinity’ referred to in the title of this book. Explaining it, and the conditions under which progress can and cannot happen, entails a journey through virtually every fundamental field of sc... See more

Once those explanations are recorded somewhere they become Knowledge. For billions of years Knowledge Creation was limited to our biological Evolution, slow and random changes over time inscribed in our DNA. Then 7,000 years ago we invented language, 5,000 years ago writing, 582 years ago printing-presses, and very recently computers and hard-drive... See more

There are many misconceptions about where scientific theories are derived from. A popular one is Empiricism, that we derive theories from our senses. Another is Inductivism, that the future will resemble the past. Testability is also generally accepted as a defining characteristic of the scientific method. All of these are wrong - there are many ex... See more

Deustsch defines Optimism as the theory that all failures are due to lack of Knowledge. That doesn't mean proceeding as if there won't be bad outcomes (since problems are inevitable) - he calls that Blind Optimism. In contrast Blind Pessimism is avoiding everything not known to be safe.