The Deepest Reasons to Defend the West

There's a difference between right and wrong, better and worse, progress and stasis, truth and falsehood. Everyone says that these dichotomies are obvious, but few take them seriously.

For instance, if some ideas are more moral than others, and if some choices really are better than others, it follows that the cultures that adopt better ideas and choices are more moral than others. Similarly, some cultures really do make progress, while others flounder. In the West, these dichotomies are denied, avoided, ridiculed, and suppressed. Never mind how this came to be—it is a civilizational problem, not only for the West, but for all of humanity.

Western civilization has reached unparalleled heights of prosperity and flourishing. Denying this achievement means never investigating why. Specifically, it means failing to discover the institutions, principles, and values that underlie the progress that the West has made. It means taking for granted the necessary ingredients for how a society can transform from a worse one to a better one. It means putting those very ingredients at risk in the West. It means hiding the virtues of the West behind a veil of self-criticism and self-hatred that makes it harder for the non-West to access the same levels of prosperity we enjoy.

Let's deny the taboo-ists and relativists their veto and ask the vital question: why is the West the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen? What are the attributes that distinguish the West from the rest? Once we identify those, we have an understanding of which elements of the West to preserve, which to change, and which to discard. And this understanding not only helps us improve our own society—with the recipe for progress in clearer view, we can, if we so choose, spread them to every other society on the planet. Everybody wins.

The answer must account for two colossal facts: that errors are inevitable, and that mankind was born into ignorance and poverty. Only in light of this reality does it make sense that progress of any kind even demands an explanation. (As it happens, many of those who either take the West for granted or deny its superiority do not know these facts.)

If errors are inevitable, then any particular error cannot be what distinguishes all other civilizations from the West. The distinguishing factor cannot be, for example, that the West's suite of scientific theories is more advanced than that of the non-Western world. Nor can it be that the West has superior technology as compared with the non-Western world. In fact, non-Western cultures are sometimes more advanced in certain domains.

Any innovator will tell you how many mistakes they make before finding success. Counterintuitively, the successful innovator will have made more mistakes than the person who chooses a predictable, safe path in life. The same goes for societies: those that make the most progress make the most errors. Ancient Egypt, impressive though its pyramids may be, scarcely improved over thousands of years—the errors of its early years were practically the same errors of its later years. Meanwhile, because the West continues to make progress, it necessarily makes entirely novel mistakes on ever-shorter timescales. For example, the United States made mistakes during Reconstruction, but those mistakes would not have even been possible had it not first corrected the error of slavery. Anti-Western critics think that the long list of Western errors is an argument in their favor. On the contrary, it points to the sheer dynamism of the West relative to all of the stagnant cultures that fail to solve problems and thereby make new errors.

The distinguishing characteristic of the West, then, is not a simple accounting of achievements and failures, as non-Western cultures can be more advanced in certain areas, or have avoided this or that failure. What distinguishes the West is that it corrects errors far better than any historical or contemporary culture.

The means of error correction, whether within a single mind, the society's culture, a private organization, or a political institution, consist of processes that can resolve, improve, or ameliorate an arbitrary sequence of errors.

Each of the West's means of error correction themselves have different attributes, as each evolved to solve a particular problem or collection of problems. The institution of science has peer review, an openness to novel hypotheses, and a university system that, at its best, facilitates both. The institution of political democracy fosters the removal of leaders and policies in favor of an alternative that (some) citizens think will better solve the problems of the day. The institution of cultural norms like freedom of expression, freedom of lifestyle, and freedom of life trajectory facilitate individuals making their own mistakes, learning from them, and changing their minds and choices accordingly. The institution of the market facilitates the allocation and reallocation of scarce resources, as entrepreneurs and consumers alike continuously sell and buy, respectively.

Of course, if errors are inevitable, then we should not expect any of these institutions to be perfect. On the contrary, it is the West and only the West that is currently capable of improving institutions indefinitely.

All of these error correcting institutions have evolved over centuries, some over millennia. And all of them exist primarily as shared ideas across people's minds—if enough people thought that they did not, in fact, correct errors and thus gave up on them, the institutions would disappear in time. On the contrary, if people can explain how and why they really are capable of resolving errors, then they will want to retain (and improve upon) them.

In other words, societies that are optimistic that errors can be corrected will want to employ and improve upon their means of correcting errors. Societies that are pessimistic about the prospects of correcting their errors will allow their means of correcting errors to languish and eventually go extinct.

But choosing between optimism and pessimism is not a matter of taste, mood, or disposition. As David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity, optimism is a physical fact—all errors are, in principle, correctable. It is just a matter of creating the right knowledge of how to do so.

The West is less optimistic today than it has been in the past. This is itself an error that Conjecture Institute exists to correct. Progress in every domain depends on it.

Everything that Conjecture Institute does is a kind of applied optimism—we are correcting many of humanity's errors with some of our deepest, yet widely unknown, ideas. Examples include the role of error correction in morality, counterfactuals in physics, freedom in parenting, creativity in artificial general intelligence, knowledge creation in economics, and objectivity in aesthetics.

Optimism in Action at Conjecture Institute: Our First Year

We launched with a founding donation from Naval Ravikant, whose early support made our initial work possible. Naval is known for his original views, his commitment to truth over consensus, and his role in spreading the ideas of David Deutsch. He is co-founder and chairman of AngelList and an early investor in over a hundred companies, including Twitter.

We have since received donations from several others, all of whom can be found on our Donor page. We are deeply grateful for all of the support we have received in these early days, during which time every donation makes an enormous difference. We are now seeking to significantly expand our resources to expedite our progress in 2026, building on the accomplishments of 2025 described below.

Our first major in-house project was The Sovereign Child, a book we wrote to revive interest in Taking Children Seriously, the only parenting philosophy that takes optimism, as defined above, seriously. We have sold over 20,000 copies since release, and foreign publishers are now translating it into Spanish, French, Chinese, and Persian. Its authors, Board Member Aaron Stupple and President Logan Chipkin, have collectively been interviewed on more than a dozen podcasts.

Following the release of The Sovereign Child, we funded thirteen Fellows: an AGI researcher, three physicists, a mathematician, a podcaster, a video animator, an epistemology educator, a science educator, a philosopher, a defender of the Enlightenment, a designer, and a generalist. We fund people, not metrics, because we know that bold work can't be planned. Our Fellows pursue diverse subject areas. Their work includes original research papers in physics and mathematics, books for general audiences, YouTube video explainers, documentaries, and fictional animations that illuminate humanity's deepest ideas. Learn more about our Fellows and their work here.

As the range of our Fellows' talents came into view, we created three arms to focus their efforts: Conjecture University, Conjecture Press, and Conjecture Studios:

1. Conjecture University includes original research in fundamental physics and mathematics as conducted by select Fellows and our Senior Scientist (see below). It will also include online courses, whose content and structure we are currently developing.
2. Conjecture Press is our in-house book publishing arm. We have already published two books and have two more in production. Many of our Fellows are also writing books that we will publish.
3. Conjecture Studios is our media arm, which includes documentaries, science fiction films, and short videos that explain ideas with the help of animations.

In the early fall, we hosted Rat Fest 2025, our fourth ideas festival, this one attended by over 75 people from all over the world. Attendees raved about the special opportunity to meet in-person and build relationships with enthusiasts who are otherwise reachable only online. We will continue to host this event annually (rebranded as Conjecture Con henceforth).

Our second book publication was Lords of the Cosmos, coauthored by Fellow Arjun Khemani and Logan Chipkin. Based on the script that Arjun and Logan wrote for Arjun's documentary—also supported by Conjecture Institute—it is a defense of Enlightenment values and a telling of the story of humanity from a knowledge-centered perspective.

As we built out our cohort of Fellows and developed a reputation across communities in academia, the startup world, and other forward-facing circles, we sought early Advisors whose work, values, and worldview align with our own.

Our first Advisor was Oxford physicist David Deutsch. Even though David Deutsch's two books, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity, are well known, a true understanding of their profundity is not, and almost everyone involved in the Institute is passionate about fixing this. Naturally, David is an ideal advisor. David is a Visiting Professor of physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University, and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The father of quantum computation and founder of constructor theory, David has solved a number of problems in fundamental physics throughout his career. He has also advanced the field of epistemology in both of his books and in academic papers. He has been awarded the Dirac Medal, the Breakthrough Prize, the Edge of Computation Science Prize, and many other honors.

Our second Advisor was computer scientist and philosopher Judea Pearl, whose work has transformed the study of causality and artificial intelligence. He is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. Best known for developing Bayesian networks and the do-calculus, Judea has provided the foundations for modern causal inference, reshaping how science, statistics, and AI address cause-and-effect questions. His books, including Causality and The Book of Why, have influenced fields ranging from epidemiology to economics. Among his many honors, he has received the A.M. Turing Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the Harvey Prize.

Because our first two Advisors are scientist-philosophers, we wanted our third Advisor to come from the sociopolitical side of things. After all, although Conjecture Institute is passionate about science and the philosophy of science, we also work on projects that are more broadly pro-civilization, pro-West, and pro-freedom.

In that spirit, our third Advisor was Daniel Hannan, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere. He is an author and columnist, and is President of the Institute for Free Trade. He teaches at the University of Buckingham and the University of Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. He has written nine books, including the Sunday Times bestseller How We Invented Freedom. He sat as a Conservative MEP (Member of European Parliament) for 21 years, and was a founder of Vote Leave. He served on the UK Board of Trade from 2019 to 2024. He writes regular columns for, among others, The Daily Mail, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Washington Examiner.

Finally, we are proud to report that we secured Oxford physicist Chiara Marletto as our Senior Scientist. Her research into constructor theory, a new fundamental theory in physics, is exactly the kind of science that Conjecture Institute supports and promotes. Constructor theory stands to advance fundamental physics by tackling real problems in physics with bold new explanations and experiments rather than just more abstract, hyper-mathematical constructs that pervade traditional academia.

More specifically, constructor theory seeks to express all laws of physics in terms of possible and impossible tasks. This new mode of explanation provides novel approaches to some of the deepest, and oldest, open questions in physics. Having established a constructor theory of information, thermodynamics, probability, and life, Chiara and her research group are now investigating how to apply ideas from constructor theory to experimentally test whether or not gravity is classical. They are also investigating a constructor theory of time and locality. Chiara is the author of The Science of Can and Can't.

Chiara's work is emblematic of the kind of research that we support.

More generally, Conjecture Institute addresses a systemic failure in academia, where groundbreaking ideas often go unfunded due to stultifying norms like incrementalism, empiricism (the false idea that all knowledge is derived from sensory data), and explanationless science.

There is no roadmap, no formula, no criteria that tell us what the content or consequences of future ideas will be. Outcomes in all human endeavors, including scientific research, are unknowable.

But without the usual academic criteria, how do we decide whom to support? We select researchers who share our particular interests in science, who are realists, who take our best ideas seriously, who are proud to be associated with Conjecture Institute, and who either show promise or who have already solved problems in science that we care about.

It sounds like a simple model because it is a simple model. And it's already working. Several of our researchers have published papers since joining Conjecture Institute and are working on several more.

Applied Optimism Accelerated: Our Second Year

In our second year, we will build out Conjecture University and Conjecture Studios far more. Our research Fellows will create preplanned courses that will serve as the educational component of Conjecture University. Our first physics explainer video for Conjecture Studios will cover the Bose-Marletto-Vedral experiment.

We will recruit another cohort of Fellows. We already have a number of candidates in mind who meet our broader strategic aims.

We have two more books in production: Bold Conjectures, Volume I and Bold Conjectures, Volume II.

We will host Conjecture Con 2026 in Philadelphia.

Much more lies ahead. Help us bring Applied Optimism to the world. We have more plans, but I will not elaborate just yet. For now, if our mission resonates with you, we invite you to support our work and reach out to us at logan@conjectureinstitute.org.

Sincerely,

Logan Chipkin
President and Cofounder, Conjecture Institute