Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability

The episode opens with housekeeping that is itself a small artefact of the era: a new podcast asking listeners to keep sharing episodes, thanking people who bought books and equipment off an Amazon wish list, one of whom bought the very microphone being recorded on, and pointing listeners at a daily Substack. The most recent post is about futarchy — prediction markets over policies — and a Robin Hanson interview is promised for the following week.

The guest is introduced as someone who co-wrote a paper with David Deutsch on the Popper-Miller theorem, and the promised territory is wider than that: the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of scientific progress, and advice to young people who want to be polymaths. Leonardis is presented as one such polymath, which matters for what follows — the argument against identifying with a method comes from someone who plainly enjoys ranging across problems.

Asked what science is, Leonardis refuses the framing. A great deal of talk about science, he says, ends up being counterproductive — not because science does not exist, but because people identify with it far too much. They wonder whether what they are doing counts as science, they think of themselves as scientists, and they wonder what they should do in their capacity as scientists. That self-interrogation, he suggests, often has a counterproductive effect on the work itself.

His historical card is the word itself: "scientist" is an early nineteenth-century coinage, traced to professors at Trinity College, Cambridge. People did science perfectly well before the word existed. The problem is not the label but the loop it creates — thinking too much about who is a scientist and what science is, rather than about the problem in front of you.

Dwarkesh pushes back gently: were people not natural philosophers before? Leonardis concedes there were names for the role, but makes a subtler point. People have always tried to understand how machines work, how nature works, how everything works — and they often did it without ever becoming conscious that they were doing anything special, or playing a special social role. The consciousness of the role, and the social role itself, had to develop. And it seems you can reach a better understanding of the natural world without either.