This Video Will Doom You. | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant i've talked often on this channel about how humans are pattern seekers we excel at it because if we can understand a pattern it gives us comfort a sense of purpose in the world we actually do excel at critical thinking and reasoning despite you know everything we've seen this last year but sometimes we work ourselves into a corner on something and come to a conclusion that doesn't make sense except it does paradoxes and thought experiments are kind of like the dark side of our superpower of reasoning these aren't meant to be taken too seriously but they can kind of give us a new perspective on our beliefs and show that the world is a lot weirder than we think it is so let's jump off the deep end together shall we [Music] all right so let's loosen up our brains and dive into some of the weirdest paradoxes and thought experiments that have been tying our brains into knots for years now and even millennia starting with the old classic the trolley problem for anyone who hasn't heard of the trolley problem it goes like this imagine being a trolley driver and the brakes stopped working you're going downhill and you can't stop and up ahead of you is a switch on the tracks and beyond that switch there are five people tied to the tracks who would be killed if you kept going in that direction but on the other track is one person tied to the track and you have to choose do you keep going down your current track and kill five people or do you switch tracks and kill the one person sounds kind of obvious killing one person is obviously not as bad as killing five people but if you choose to switch the tracks then you are choosing to kill that person you are sentencing that person to death whereas if you just continued on your current track you're sort of absolved of guilt because that was the track that you were on anyway of course once switching became an option you're still making a choice even if you choose to do nothing so those five people are still on you so what do you do what do you do english philosopher philippa foote created this problem in 1967 although it was judith thompson from mit who coined the term trolley problem thompson's also responsible for a different version of this where the person on the trolley could stop the trolley from hitting people by throwing a fat person in front of it why a fat person i don't know there are also various versions of the trolley problem where that one person is somebody that you know or something like your wife or your mom or something like that anyway what's the point of the trolley problem besides being the inspiration for plot devices and shows like the good place and the dark knight it makes you kind of examine your ethics and beliefs you let five people die if you believe that the best choice is the one that serves the greatest good for the greatest number of people as like you know killing one person instead of five people then you're aligned with utilitarianism but if you believe that the act itself determines morality then you're more aligned with deontological ethics you can also think of it as determinism versus free will it's that classic dilemma and that's the point you'll have to choose especially for michael in the good place who asked the question how do you kill all six people so i would dangle a sharp blade out the window to slice the neck of the guy on the other track as we smush our five main guys there are more things in heaven and earth horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy so says hamlet in the play bearing his name a play by the way that was written by a primate specifically william apespear the bard of ape vaughn who wrote some of the world's most eight peeling plays all right enough in monkey business and yes i know the difference between a monkey and an ape do you huh do ya sorry for the the infinite monkey theorem is the idea that if you put a monkey in front of a typewriter and gave it an infinite amount of time hitting random keys eventually it would pin the complete works of william shakespeare but i mean come on do we need another taming of the shrew it's 2021 get woke bill ap way since there's only a limited number of keys that are possible to hit given enough amount of time every single permutation or combination of those letters will be typed it was the best of times it was the burst of times you stupid monkey this theorem touches on everything from evolution to probability to even multiverse theories french mathematician emil burrell first presented the idea in his 1913 paper le machinique statique reverse static irreversibility yeah given an infinite amount of time i might actually pronounce a french word correctly and believe it or not somebody actually tested this theory with an actual monkey and an actual typewriter in 2003 some lecturers and students of the university of plymouth's institute of digital arts and technology in england placed a computer and keyboard in the salawacy crested macox enclosure at the pangton zoo after a whole month the six macox produced nothing more than a few pages of nonsensical text they spent most of their time defecating and urinating on the computer until it didn't work anymore so they are basically just shooting all over the computer in other words they were writing the taming of the shrew and since we can never talk enough about infinity let's stick with that topic and explore hilbert's paradox of the grand hotel german mathematician david hilbert devised this paradox in 1924 and it basically just plays with some of the absurdities around infinity the idea is imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and all of those rooms are filled with guests now you might think that since all the rooms are occupied that you couldn't get any more guests in there but this is an infinity hotel so a new guest arrives and wants to book a room since there are infinitely many rooms the hotel manager moves the guest in room 1 to room 2 the guest in room 2 to room 3 and so on and the new guest just goes into room one simple so far okay so now imagine if an infinite number of guests wanted to stay at this hotel same rule applies just move one person to the next room slide that person into the new room so on and so forth in general the formula is room in to room two in so all the odd number rooms are now available for the free guests all this is beside the fact that this is not how hotels work could you imagine if you had to move into a new room every time a new guest came into a hotel probably not great yelp reviews for the infiniti hotel but just to go deeper though what if an infinite number of buses arrived with an infinite number of people on each bus and all of them needed to get into the hotel well euclid showed in 300 bce that there is an infinite number of prime numbers knowing this the manager assigns every current guest the first prime number which is 2 raised to the power of their current room number the manager then takes the passengers off the first bus and assigns the next prime number of 3 raised to the power of their seat numbers the passengers on the second bus are assigned the next prime number of five raised to the power of their seat numbers and this goes on until a manager accommodates all the infinite number of people on the infinite buses and yes there are some rooms that go unfilled because six is not a power of a prime number anyway let's hope this hotel has infinite towels and the guests have infinite patience all right so these have all been fun and games so far let's talk about a thought experiment that may cause extreme existential torment that is uh kind of what we do here this paradox is known as rocco's bacillus and it first showed up on the less wrong discussion board online the word basilisk is used because just hearing about this paradox could put your life at risk a bacillus by the way is a mythological creature with a deathly gaze or breath it's named after a guy who went by the name of roko one of the board members he proposed this in 2010 and it goes like this in the future what if a malevolent ai super intelligence came into being and decided that it wanted to punish everybody who didn't help it come into existence meaning if you know about the possibility of this happening and you don't step up and help this ai to come into existence you're doomed of course if you do help this ai come into existence then you're dooming everybody else meaning um i have now cursed you because now that you know about this if you don't help this ai come into existence then you know it'll kill you to death yeah sorry about that rocco based the thought experiment on something known as coherent extrapolated volition or cev cav was created by the founder of les wrong eliza yotkowski and it kind of goes like this it is quote an argument that it would not be sufficient to explicitly program what we think our desires and motivations are into an ai instead we should find a way to program it in a way that it would act in our best interest what we want it to do and not what we tell it to do i'll put a link down in the description if you want to know the full scope of cev by the way yukowski was not happy with what roko did to his idea he called it stupid and basically banned anybody from talking about it for five years you do not think in sufficient detail about super intelligences considering whether or not to blackmail you yatkowski posted in all caps that is the only possible thing which gives him a motive to follow through on the blackmail so that escalated quickly and it sounds like he's punishing people for not bringing his idea to life he's the basilisk many commenters pointed out that uh an ai like roko presented would have no actual motive to follow through on its threat basically that once the ai already exists it can't change the probability of it existing so punishing all these people would just be a waste of resources but do you really want to take that chance or is it better to as the joke says welcome your eventual ai overlords anyway those are the four that i wanted to talk about here today there's plenty others that i could have brought in here that deal with everything from game theory to ethics to infinity in fact there are a lot of them about infinity i think it's just because the entire concept of infinity is just such a mind blow paradoxes and thought experiments around infinity really push you to to re-examine what you think is true about reality and space and time like there are infinities going out into the vastness of space and their infinities going down small going down into you meaning in a very real sense you are an infinite being in an infinite universe so talk about it down in the comments what is your take on these thought experiments and paradoxes what's your favorite one that maybe wasn't listed here and if the concept of infinity breaks your brain the way it does mine then of course you've got to check out the infinity course on brilliant through 13 interactive quizzes and 120 exercises you'll get a handle on concepts like cardinality fractals tessellations in hyperbolic space and the mind-blowing cantor's theorem and if all that sounds like gibberish to you don't worry it'll make sense in time and if just jumping in with one of the most difficult mathematical concepts known to man is too much to start with you can always just start with a mathematic fundamentals course and work your way up from there and that's what's so brilliant about brilliant they walk you through the basics and teach you through problem solving so you know you've got to handle on it before you move up to the more difficult stuff and since you're using your own reasoning superpower to learn it it makes it easier to apply to other areas of your life and they make it easy to make learning a habit so you can do it on your mobile device or even offline so whenever you're just like waiting for food or something you can bang out a problem or two and if you want to get a taste of what i'm talking about they have free daily brain teasers and you can do the first section of any of their courses for free so you can see what they're all about but if you do sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses and you're one of the first 200 people to do so you can get 20 off if you go to brilliant.org slash answers with joe it's just a great way to learn things and they've been adding all kinds of really cool stuff it's a lot more interactive these days it's kind of a lot more story problem solving kind of stuff on there so if you haven't checked it out in a while definitely go do so anyway brilliant.org answers with joe link's down below big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon and the channel members that are helping to support this financially and and just making an awesome community and i love all you guys we've got some new channel members i need to shout out real quick we got me guys name is me uh thomas rockolowski walter staley uh christian baning um dharma heatherington pat telmer andrew carey john michael david miller sean summer and j.r thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get early access to videos and access to exclusive live streams just hit the join button right down below please do like and share this video if you liked it and if you want to learn more and see what else i got going on google thinks you might like this one it's a good place to start you can also check any of the others down there that might have my face on them do go check them out and if you like them and you want to see more i encourage you to subscribe i come back videos every monday all right cool beans that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

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Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

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Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021