Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
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Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Matjaž Leonardis. Matjaž has co-written a paper with David Deutsch about the Palmer-Miller Theorem, and we get into that, as well as the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of scientific progress, and advice to young people who want to be polymaths. Matjaž is one such, as you will see, he's a fascinating person that have had the pleasure of getting to know, and he has a broad range of interesting ideas, which we get into. So, without further ado, here's Matjaž Leonardis. Okay, Matjaž, you have co-written a paper with David Deutsch about Bayes Theorem, but before we get into that, let's talk about the big picture questions, science.
What is it? And is it somewhat of a confusion to even talk about it distinctly from other disciplines?

**Matjaž Leonardis** (1:52)
Well, so my view on that subject is that often a lot of talk about science ends up being quite counterproductive. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as science, but I definitely think that people identify with science too much. They wonder whether what they are doing is science.
They think they are scientists and wonder what is it that they should do in their capacity as scientists.
And I think that often has a counterproductive effect on basically what they do. Now one interesting thing to note is that the name scientist is actually an early 19th century invention. It was traced back to I think to professors at I think Trinity College in Cambridge. And it's and you know people were able to do science before that quite well. And so one of the problems that I see I guess in that in that respect is just that people perhaps think about you know what is a scientist and sorry who is a scientist and what is science a bit too much.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:10)
But I don't know the history here. Do people not consider themselves natural philosophers before then?

**Matjaž Leonardis** (3:16)
There is definitely been sort of names for this role. The so one way to sort of think about it is that people have always thought about the natural world though, right? So people have always tried to understand how machines work, how nature works, how sort of everything does. And they often did that without ever becoming conscious of the idea that they were doing anything special or that they are playing a special role by doing so. And they were able to sort of do it just fine. And one of the things that, at some point, that obviously changed, this sort of idea that one is engaged in some sort of a special activity when one is trying to understand nature and there being kind of a special social role for that, like all of that obviously have to develop.
But it does seem to be the case that you can reach a better understanding of the natural world without it.
Let me ask you this question.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (4:23)
Sorry, go ahead.

**Matjaž Leonardis** (4:24)
And therefore, there is a question about whether it is actually helpful.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (4:28)
Okay. Well, the identity of scientists is not that useful. Then why do we have universities that we consider to be special places and we employ people with tax dollars to do special things that I mean, clearly they're not being construction or building archers or something like that.