By skyforbes 
Should leadership privilege explanation over prediction? — Designing extensible systems — and cultures — that compound knowledge over time.
David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity is an ambitious treatise on the power of explanation and the boundless potential of knowledge. Deutsch argues that good explanations — ideas that can’t be easily modified without losing explanatory power — are the engine of progress, from scientific revolutions to moral and social advances ¹. He presents a “principle of optimism” which holds that all failures and evils are due to insufficient knowledge, and thus that problems are inevitable but soluble given the right ingenuity ² ³. The book celebrates human creativity as potentially unending (“the beginning of infinity”), crediting the Enlightenment’s tradition of criticism for opening this path of unlimited improvement. Deutsch is at his best illuminating how fundamental ideas — the discovery of universal computation, the logic of the multiverse, the evolution of scientific values — enabled leaps in capability and understanding. He makes a compelling case that with an open, error-correcting approach, there are no necessary limits to growth in knowledge or improvement ² ⁴. This…
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