A needed reminder that progress depends less on what we invent than on what we’re willing to build. (Sound obvious? Then we should all make a bundle like OpenAI's Sam Altman, and skip novelty by scaling the tried and true.) Thompson makes the case that Operation Warp Speed wasn’t a miracle—it was a model. The real challenge is whether we can summon that same urgency for cancer drugs, clean cement, and everything else we keep postponing.
You’re not going to discover the cause of a disease until you’ve accurately described its symptoms, but you’re not going to cure the disease by accurately describing its symptoms. Instead, you need to discover its cause.
Where the “disease” is our culture’s failure to apply the lessons learned in Operation Warp Speed and other scientific breakthroughs, its cure was discovered in 2015 when the “wisdom hypothesis” explained a simple experiment first conducted in the 1980s by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet.
So, why isn’t the disease cured? Because the fields of psychology and neuroscience dropped the “hypotheses are for testing” ball.
Miles Davis said, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” Likewise, it’s not the hypothesis you derive that’s the wrong hypothesis — it’s whether you test the hypothesis afterwards that makes it right or wrong. Unfortunately, the fields of psychology and neuroscience failed to test the veto hypothesis, and now they behave as if it has been definitively confirmed. And yet, testing reveals that it is easily refuted.
A hypothesis explains an observed phenomenon, but it begins as pure speculation. The goal of testing is to definitively refute or conclusively confirm. If testing refutes a hypothesis, then other hypotheses emerge until one is eventually confirmed.
The Libet experiment reveals how the conscious and unconscious minds interact. In the roughly 500 ms between a stimulus and a voluntary act, there is an undisputed scientific consensus that the unconscious mind forms an “action potential” in 300 ms, then the conscious mind becomes aware of the impending response in the remaining 200 ms, and then the action is triggered by the unconscious mind.
Libet’s speculative “veto hypothesis” assumes that the conscious mind can prevent the triggering of an action by vetoing the action potential.
The best time to acknowledge that the veto hypothesis is definitively refuted was two generations ago. The second-best time is now.
The bad news is that the symptoms of the disease are getting worse. The good news is that I’m sharing its cure in a short essay, and all it requires is implementation. Here’s the link:
A needed reminder that progress depends less on what we invent than on what we’re willing to build. (Sound obvious? Then we should all make a bundle like OpenAI's Sam Altman, and skip novelty by scaling the tried and true.) Thompson makes the case that Operation Warp Speed wasn’t a miracle—it was a model. The real challenge is whether we can summon that same urgency for cancer drugs, clean cement, and everything else we keep postponing.
You’re not going to discover the cause of a disease until you’ve accurately described its symptoms, but you’re not going to cure the disease by accurately describing its symptoms. Instead, you need to discover its cause.
Where the “disease” is our culture’s failure to apply the lessons learned in Operation Warp Speed and other scientific breakthroughs, its cure was discovered in 2015 when the “wisdom hypothesis” explained a simple experiment first conducted in the 1980s by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet.
So, why isn’t the disease cured? Because the fields of psychology and neuroscience dropped the “hypotheses are for testing” ball.
Miles Davis said, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” Likewise, it’s not the hypothesis you derive that’s the wrong hypothesis — it’s whether you test the hypothesis afterwards that makes it right or wrong. Unfortunately, the fields of psychology and neuroscience failed to test the veto hypothesis, and now they behave as if it has been definitively confirmed. And yet, testing reveals that it is easily refuted.
A hypothesis explains an observed phenomenon, but it begins as pure speculation. The goal of testing is to definitively refute or conclusively confirm. If testing refutes a hypothesis, then other hypotheses emerge until one is eventually confirmed.
The Libet experiment reveals how the conscious and unconscious minds interact. In the roughly 500 ms between a stimulus and a voluntary act, there is an undisputed scientific consensus that the unconscious mind forms an “action potential” in 300 ms, then the conscious mind becomes aware of the impending response in the remaining 200 ms, and then the action is triggered by the unconscious mind.
Libet’s speculative “veto hypothesis” assumes that the conscious mind can prevent the triggering of an action by vetoing the action potential.
The best time to acknowledge that the veto hypothesis is definitively refuted was two generations ago. The second-best time is now.
The bad news is that the symptoms of the disease are getting worse. The good news is that I’m sharing its cure in a short essay, and all it requires is implementation. Here’s the link:
https://jamesrcarey.substack.com/p/authoritarian-autocracies-e13
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