Scott Young - Ultralearning

Speaker 1 I feel like people are just way too unambitious in general and not in like the ambition, like, I want to be better than other people, way, but they just don't think of big projects, they don't work on them, they don't, they don't have like, you know, big dreams to do cool things.

Speaker 1 Or if they are, it's usually just something like, I don't know, it usually boils down to something like social status.

Speaker 1 Like, I want to be the, you know, the person that does this that's better than other people.

Speaker 1 And I don't know, I feel like, I don't know how you change that, but I do think that rewarding kind of a culture where you want to do kind of ambitious, original things that are kind of interesting and you don't know where they're going to lead.

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 having that in you is kind of rare. And I think that cultivating it is probably good for yourself and society.

Speaker 2 Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Scott Young, who is the author of the book Ultra Learning, Accelerate Your Career, Master Hard Skills, and Outsmart Your Competition.

Speaker 2 So Scott, I'll ask you some practical questions in a second. But first, let's talk about Einstein and Newton.

Speaker 2 So they both had an Anna's Mirabelis, a miracle year, within which many of their important contributions were concentrated. What explains this phenomenon of miracle years?

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think whenever you look at these sort of outlier people, like Newton and Einstein are certainly one,

Speaker 1 you have to realize that most people never have a year where they accomplish anything like that. So, I think it's just,

Speaker 1 I think it's a lot of its selection effect that you have a smart person who just happens to be working on the problem that will lead to a huge breakthrough. And so, I mean,

Speaker 1 we could have lived in a world where Newton spent a lot of time on alchemy and then discovered the way to turn lead into gold. And then, like, that worked, but that's not the world that we live in.

Speaker 1 And so, I think that, you know, his work on physics and the Principia and stuff like that was what led to the breakthrough.

Speaker 1 And I think Einstein's a little rare that he had kind of a couple key insights insights that led to physics.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, he discovers or sort of proves through Brownian motion the existence of atoms.

Speaker 1 He discovered the photoelectric effect, which is the thing he actually won the Nobel for, not his relativity, which is what he's, you know, the thing he revolutionized physics for is not really even what he

Speaker 1 got the Nobel Prize for, was the photoelectric effect, which, I mean, I guess it started quantum mechanics, so it's not really, can't downplay it too much, but then special relativity.

Speaker 1 And then he struggles with the math for like eight years to get general relativity.

Speaker 1 So I think Einstein's a, you know, he's a little bit of an exception in that he he did have like multiple huge breakthroughs.

Speaker 1 And so when people are talking about like lists of geniuses or people who are important, sometimes that list gets populated by people who don't really deserve to be there.

Speaker 1 But Einstein is definitely like not, he's like an accurately related rated genius that

Speaker 1 is seen as being extremely smart and important and actually is extremely smart and important.

Speaker 2 Right. But as you mentioned, they were different problems, right? And unless there's like a deeper principle, which I'm missing,

Speaker 2 I am having trouble understanding why many, like special relative depot, electric effect, and Brownian motion happened in the same year.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. I think that

Speaker 1 for Albert Einstein's case, the fact that the kinds of problems he was working on I think were also amenable to his sort of style of thinking.

Speaker 1 So, you know, I'm a big fan of the Isaacson biography of Einstein. I talked about about it.
I did a little kind of summary post on my blog.

Speaker 1 And you can see that Einstein is really one of the great intuitive physicists. Like he's very much a spatial visual person.

Speaker 1 And so like his thought experiments are really kind of the mechanism that he's using to generate these insights. And so,

Speaker 1 you know, putting the photoelectric effect aside for a second, you know, the special relativity is this kind of, all right, we have these weird experimental results that show that the speed of light doesn't vary depending on which direction you do it, which is weird because, you know, if you think about a wave and it's going through some medium,

Speaker 1 then if you're moving relative to the medium, the speed should change, but it doesn't seem to do that.

Speaker 1 And so, kind of like working through the geometric implications of that, and then getting to this idea that, like, well, lengths will contract as you go faster.

Speaker 1 And these are all mind-bending, but they come from this kind of rigorously working out the intuitions of this.

Speaker 1 And you can see that as being somewhat different, maybe, than the more mathematical physicists who were,

Speaker 1 you know, very, very strong at some of this advanced math. And it was a little bit less of a kind of like, well, what's my physical intuition about this?

Speaker 1 But more like, well, what is a way of representing this? And like, you know, I'm maybe getting a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but I'm imagining like people come up with matrix mechanics.

Speaker 1 This is just a little bit sort of like, oh, this is an interesting pattern, or this is one way you could do it that makes the math easier and stuff.

Speaker 1 And I think even, you know, Einstein, I believe it was Minkowski who he worked with on like the tensor stuff because he kind of was like a little bit more limited there. Not that Einstein wasn't also

Speaker 1 brilliant at math, but it's definitely that's not what led to his huge breakthroughs was this kind of he had some intuition and then he kind of worked to formalize it.

Speaker 1 Whereas for other people, it might be like, oh, this is an interesting mathematical pattern. I wonder whether or not it would work for this particular problem.

Speaker 1 So I think that it may just be that these types of problems were kind of uniquely suited to his sort of style of doing physics.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if you look into the different time periods, it may just be the case that, okay, there were a few insights that required someone with this kind of skill set to unlock them.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 this also relates to an essay you wrote called The Narrow Path of Success,

Speaker 2 where you explained that you kind of have to be following the right track to be successful in many ways. Doesn't the example of Einstein confound that explanation?

Speaker 2 Because you have somebody who's a patent clerk and get an academic job many years after he did special relativity is still going can get an academic job. Um, yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, well, I think when I'm talking about the sort of surprisingly narrow path to success, this is just sort of this kind of contrary to this idea that people have, and it's sort of this romantic idea that, like, in kind of high-ambition fields, you can kind of just do whatever you want, and then like someone will recognize you, and then it'll work.

Speaker 1 And if you actually get data on how these careers actually work, it's clear that's not how they work. So, uh, the kind of motivating example that caused me to write that post is reading Jason,

Speaker 1 excuse me, Jason Brennan's book, Good Work If You Can Get It, which is about kind of a very data-driven approach to analyzing how careers work in academia. And the picture he paints is stark.

Speaker 1 Like, there's way more people going into academia than there are academic jobs, and the actual process of getting those jobs is quite rigid, and that the filters are quite rigid. And so,

Speaker 1 I think, um, you know, Einstein, we're using him as a bit of a counterexample, but he kind of isn't because, like, he had some sort of bad things on his resume and he had a really hard time getting a physics job.

Speaker 1 So, the right way of looking at that is that Einstein struggled to get through this because he didn't have the right resume, and you're not Einstein.

Speaker 1 So, that's sort of the thing that I would put kind of put. And I think there are always these exceptions where someone had kind of

Speaker 1 the wrong start to things and then had this like truly spectacular, you know, one in a million kind of result that brought them stardom. But you can't really count on that, right?

Speaker 1 And I think that's sort of the lesson here. And so like, you know, we kind of romanticize the Einstein stories, but if you're just doing it from a, okay, well, what is the typical path for people?

Speaker 1 And how do, you know, 80, 99% of people find success in this field, that's what you should be betting on.

Speaker 1 You know, you shouldn't be going into a poker game, you know, well, if I get a royal flush, then I'll be really good.

Speaker 1 You need to bet it on, well, you know, given that I have probably an average hand, what's the way I should play? And so I do think if you are in the top 0.01%,

Speaker 1 then don't listen to me because you're smarter than me, right? Like you know what you should be doing.

Speaker 1 But if you're like everyone else and you're trying to figure out what you should be doing best, I think

Speaker 1 understanding the path to success in most fields and what is the typical path is so important because generally, if you are outside of that path, you're going to be facing strong headwinds.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, if you're a remarkable Nobel Prize winning genius, then maybe you will, you know, see some success. But if you are not, then you're kind of stacking the odds against you for no reason.

Speaker 1 And, you know, one of my favorite examples from that post is I talk about how in non-fiction book publishing, there is an established path.

Speaker 1 And that path is you first get an agent, because getting an agent is easier than getting a book deal.

Speaker 1 And then you work on a proposal, which is partly what the book is going to be and partly also kind of like a business plan to show that you've thought out why this book will actually sell enough to interest the publisher and then you pitch it and you get a book deal and then you write it and so the writing it is coming way way late in this process and what most people do is they write the book first and then they look around for people who will publish it which is like screams amateur to publishers and they don't like that and so it's very difficult even if your book is like pretty good to get a book deal that way there there are exceptions but it's difficult right and so this is sort of if you are serious about becoming a non-fiction author the the first step would be try to get an agent, right?

Speaker 1 Like, obviously, if you're self-publishing, none of this applies, but if you're trying to go through a traditional publisher, you want to have a published book through an actual, you know, serious publisher.

Speaker 1 That's what you want to do. And I remember I wrote this and someone was kind of like upset, like, well, what, well, why do I have to do that? Why do I have to do it this way?

Speaker 1 And it's not that you have to do it that way. It's just that if you're not doing it that way, you're making it harder for yourself.

Speaker 1 So I think it's always fine to do something weird and, you know, creative, but you you should know that that's the strategy you're picking and that you're kind of making it hard for yourself in certain ways if you do it that way.

Speaker 1 And so I think this sort of narrow path to success kind of ties into one of my kind of major points, not only in ultra-learning, but in my sort of philosophy in general, which is that people really ought to do more research about what.

Speaker 1 what is the sort of typical way that these kinds of things succeed before they embark in projects. Because even if you decide, well, I'm not going to do it that way.

Speaker 1 I've got like kind of a my own path that I think is going to work better for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 You should know what the status quo is. You should know what that works.
You shouldn't just like, oh, well, I didn't know that that's how people did this or that's how you got success in this field.

Speaker 1 And that this research is not actually even that hard to do for most things. It is not like it requires super secret knowledge.

Speaker 1 It's just most people don't know how to do it or they don't care to do it or they don't want to find out the answer because maybe it's not something that they want to hear.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Okay, so maybe we shouldn't be studying the exceptions that hard.

Speaker 2 But let me just ask you one more question about how Einstein's way of learning contrasts with ultra learning.

Speaker 2 So he seems to have lacked the sort of structure and discipline and organization a sort of ultra-learning project kind of requires, right?

Speaker 2 Is that evidence for a more like fun-based and excitement and a curiosity-based form of learning?

Speaker 1 Well, I don't know whether that's true.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, again, I'm going off the Isaacson biography here, but I mean, einstein did an enormous amount of kind of deep thinking on hard problems when it wasn't necessary so he's the patent clerk and he's working through some of these hard ideas so i don't know whether it like you know fits this mold i think I think this is important to keep in mind too, that when you write a self-improvement book like ultra-learning, you do kind of want to create it in a somewhat structured way.

Speaker 1 So you're taking what was sort of in some ways the kind of spontaneous intuitive approaches that people who were successful using and you're trying to turn it into a structure that someone who wouldn't do that automatically could follow and so similarly you know if you were to try to analyze any any kind of domain of of importance and then relate it to someone you have to make it into a format that okay well you need to follow these steps so in in my mind like einstein was one of the people that i i researched uh for the book and i would have maybe considered him as one of the vignettes in the the book if he wasn't like way too famous and people people have already heard too much about him.

Speaker 1 So like it wasn't because I thought he wasn't suitable. Now there's certainly people that I think do kind of break the mold because they're doing a lot of things that,

Speaker 1 you know, cognitive science sends to say are like bad practice and yet they're really successful.

Speaker 1 And so like I kind of give Terrence Tao as like the counterexample of being someone who like just seems to be really, really, really smart.

Speaker 1 And like there, he's not really doing anything particularly special. And I mean, there's other people that I talk about as well that they are kind of mild counterexamples.

Speaker 1 But in my mind, Albert Einstein definitely isn't one of them. He seems to be someone who

Speaker 1 followed a lot of the ideas, even if he wasn't necessarily doing them,

Speaker 1 doing them in a kind of structured approach. He was doing them sort of a little bit more, they just came naturally to him.

Speaker 2 Interesting. What's the relationship between age and ultra-learning?

Speaker 2 Is there a prime age where you're at the peak of both your plasticity, but also your maturity to be able to to learn things very fast.

Speaker 1 Well, there's kind of two questions here. So, one of the questions is, are the kinds of principles and techniques that I talk about in ultra-learning age-specific? And I would say probably not.

Speaker 1 It seems to be the case that retrieval works better than review. I don't see a reason why that would change as you get older.
Similarly, like feedback is going to be important whether you're 79 or 17.

Speaker 1 Like, they're not, I don't think that those things are going to change. So, you could read ultra-learning.
And if you were sort of like, okay, what practical steps should I take to learn X or Y?

Speaker 1 I don't think that the advice would change too, too much.

Speaker 1 Now, the other point you're kind of making is ultra learning as this kind of like, can you be really successful at an ambitious learning project? How does that change when you age?

Speaker 1 And that certainly does change. So we know, for instance, that like fluid intelligence probably declines from your early 20s.
It kind of straight lines downward.

Speaker 1 Things like working memory and stuff also decline. I did an essay where I dove into some of the research on aging and learning.

Speaker 1 And that's a really interesting subfield and i didn't i did it after the book so i didn't include any of it in the book but

Speaker 1 one of the things that's a key finding is that the frontal areas of the brain seem to be the parts that deteriorate faster as we age and so the two main things that tend to be harder as you get older is one is the kind of frontal the frontal areas so think about this as kind of like your executive control of like dictating where you should focus your attention um being able to switch rules for things so if it's it's like I give you a puzzle where you have to apply a certain rule to a problem, but then I switch it suddenly and you have to apply a different rule, there's more perseverance.

Speaker 1 Like people who are older have a harder time switching because this kind of like, oh, the habit that they want to override, they're having a harder time switching back and forth.

Speaker 1 And so this does suggest, for instance, in areas of focus that if you're older, you need to pay more attention to having an environment that's conducive to focus.

Speaker 1 Because if you're 21, maybe you can have the television on in the background and just tune it out.

Speaker 1 But if you're maybe 75, you may just find it impossible to keep from being distracted because of that frontal area stuff.

Speaker 1 There's also stuff on chunking that there seems to be difficulties with like the medial temporal lobe areas, which are involved with like binding information.

Speaker 1 So that's a big part of the intuition chapter. I talk about chunking where you're kind of assembling pieces of information together so that they can be attached.

Speaker 1 And it seems like people that are older have more difficulty doing that, which would obviously impact learning.

Speaker 1 But it's also why like, you know, someone who is older might recognize someone, but they can't remember their name as easily because the name and the facial recognition just don't bind as strongly as like, oh, it's, I recognize this person and their name is so-and-so, and I know that they went to school here and this is how I know them and all of that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 And so there might be some benefit of being more explicit in how you kind of put information together so that you can bind it more easily.

Speaker 1 For instance, there's studies that show that like if you're making flashcards, for instance, and you have to do more manipulation to like show how the parts connect with the flashcards.

Speaker 1 So, like, in this particular example,

Speaker 1 I'm working off of memory here.

Speaker 1 They were talking about like learning Chinese words. And so, there's the characters and the pronunciation, and there's two characters and two pronunciation.

Speaker 1 And if you put them side by side, what you have to do is take like the first part of one and link it with the first part of the other, and the second part of one and link it with the other.

Speaker 1 And it turns out this makes it somewhat harder to remember than if they're on top of each other, and there's just an easy visual link.

Speaker 1 And so you could think of maybe if you're older and you're struggling more with these kinds of issues,

Speaker 1 organizing your material better, making the connections between things you have to learn more explicit, having that kind of pre-processing work might be a little bit better.

Speaker 1 But I think those are also things that would benefit people who just struggle with learning more. So if you have kind of

Speaker 1 if you feel like you're more distractible, if you feel like you struggle to understand concepts, I mean, those are also things that would apply.

Speaker 1 So that would be my connection between age and learning. But I think, you know, the broader

Speaker 1 thing that I think matters is just that

Speaker 1 when you're learning something, using the correct strategy is mostly going to be the same.

Speaker 1 So I don't think it's the case that there's some strategy that works for really smart people and some strategy that works for people that don't. The same things probably work.

Speaker 1 It's just, it's going to be easier if you're more intelligent or you're younger or you have those advantages.

Speaker 2 Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Although the principle of transfer seems to be injured by uh your explanation that your capacity to look beyond superficial differences and recognize deeper principles is harmed by age right or connect different concepts yeah i don't know whether it's the case that you're like so there's two issues there so the the issue of being able to look at what the deeper principle is i think is part of this problem that um you need a lot of exposure to a field and to the knowledge in the field in order to build up this kind of repertoire of patterns so that when you see it, you can actually see what the principles are.

Speaker 1 And so that's one of those sort of things that like there's, I forget the name of the study, but it was like one of those classic cog-size studies where they took physics novices and experts and showed how they look at problems.

Speaker 1 And the novices focus on stupid stuff like, oh, this involves a pulley or an incline ramp, whereas the experts are like, oh, this is a conservation of energy problem.

Speaker 1 And so the kind of naive way is thinking, oh, well, it would be nice. We should just tell people how to recognize whether it's a conservation of energy problem.

Speaker 1 But the problem is that the conservation of energy aspect of it is

Speaker 1 a kind of abstract property of the problem. And so whether it involves a pulley is an obvious aspect.

Speaker 1 And so what you need to be able to do is look at all those obvious aspects and then figure out what the abstract or higher thing is. And it seems like you probably do this through chunking.

Speaker 1 So you probably learn all these smaller patterns and you build it up so that when you see it, it just all comes together and you can see what the situation is.

Speaker 1 And so I do think it's probably the case that if you're learning something that has a lot of abstraction,

Speaker 1 really spending time to kind of familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the more basic pieces allow those things to kind of lock together faster.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, the vignette I chose for that one was Feynman, just because he had spent so much time kind of playing around with math.

Speaker 1 He just had so much familiarity that he was like this encyclopedia of like weird math trivia.

Speaker 1 So, you know, like just random stuff comes up and he can come up with the answer because he has all these patterns that are stored in memory.

Speaker 2 Right. So that was a part of the book that I was thinking about a lot because

Speaker 2 there was that part of intuition where Widish explains that, you know, your memories in area one can influence and help your knowledge in area two.

Speaker 2 But then the chapter on directness talks about the failures of transfer learning. And so I was just trying to put those two things together.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think so.

Speaker 1 If we're kind of visualizing it a little bit here, the principle of intuition is sort of recognizing that

Speaker 1 because of this sort of hierarchical structure of chunking, you have this kind of building up layers of abstraction on top of each other.

Speaker 1 And what the thing on transfer is showing is that when you go from one domain to another,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 problem with the transfer idea is that when we talk about learning skills, we tend to use fairly general labels for things. So we say kind of like, well, I'm going to get good at X.

Speaker 1 And X is just this sort of broad category of skills. And what is sort of missing from that is that to actually perform those skills quite well, you have to do something very, very precise.

Speaker 1 And so it seems to be. a general feature of the brain that it learns things quite specifically and that is how it works.

Speaker 1 It's not just like a defect, but like that's that's why we're smart is because we can make very fine-grained discriminations between things. And so

Speaker 1 you can get transfer if you're thinking about it in terms of like, well, I understand domain one well enough that I can see abstract pattern here.

Speaker 1 And I understand domain two well enough that I can understand abstract pattern here. And I can see that these are the same abstract pattern and I can make that linkage.

Speaker 1 But the problem is that if you haven't chunked the first domain enough to get up to that.

Speaker 1 pattern and you're trying to talk about the next they don't match because superficially they're quite different, right?

Speaker 1 So, this is like this issue where, yes, if you understand physics problems well enough that you can see that this conservation of energy is this principle that holds, and then you start learning a new domain and you realize, oh, this is actually like conservation of energy.

Speaker 1 You get it up to that level of abstraction, then yes, you can do that transfer.

Speaker 1 But the problem is that most people don't have this sort of like richly abstract sort of principle-based reasoning about things.

Speaker 1 And so they just see all these superficial details and they have nothing to do with each other.

Speaker 1 And if the superficial details of one don't have to do with the superficial details of another, there's zero transfer there because they don't look alike at all.

Speaker 1 And so I think, you know, one of the books that I read that was sort of a major source of the research on transfer was, I think it was called Transfer of Cognitive Skill.

Speaker 1 And I'm blanking on the author's name right now, but it's mentioned in my,

Speaker 1 I think it's Haskell, maybe, is mentioned in Ultra Learning.

Speaker 1 And sort of that's his point later in the book is that his idea about how we overcome this transfer problem is that we teach more theory, because ideally if we have this sort of richer more abstract ideas about things then we're getting it to a level where it can transfer above these superficialities i'm a little bit more skeptical of that because i feel like well that's kind of what universities do is teach theory and it doesn't seem to work very well so you're kind of suggesting what we're already doing but i think the point that i want to make in the director's chapter is presumably you're reading this book and there's something you want to be good at right and so if you want to be good at it then make sure that like specific skills, the micro skills that need to be in place, are the ones that you actually need in the real situation.

Speaker 1 Because if there's mismatch, your performance is going to go down considerably. And there's lots of real-world situations where, you know, just having a theoretical insight is not enough.

Speaker 1 You need to actually perform all of these small sub-skills. And if you don't have the sub-skills, your performance is zero.

Speaker 1 And so, if you're doing some training that doesn't work on the sub-skills you need, you're not actually going to be able to perform.

Speaker 1 So, I'm talking about it very abstractly, but like language learning is the example I use there that if you only learn how to recognize sentences,

Speaker 1 so you can't actually recall them, then that's useless for you when you're speaking because

Speaker 1 you're not recognizing sentences. What you're doing is actually speaking.
And so I'm very critical of Duolingo there because a lot of the exercises they do are not recall.

Speaker 1 They're just, you know, doing multiple choice from the word bank, but actually speaking involves recall. It also involves pronunciation.

Speaker 1 It also involves working around words you don't understand and these kinds of things.

Speaker 1 And so I think the more you analyze skills you're trying to learn, you realize, oh, this is why this thing doesn't work because the actual thing that I need to do in the performance situation is not what I've been training.

Speaker 2 This makes me wonder if this explains why very widely read people and very broadly knowledgeable people don't seem that much smarter than just generally widely read people.

Speaker 2 I have Tyler Cowan on the podcast and I asked him, did he learn more between in the last 10 years than he did between the ages of say 15 and 25? And he said, obviously 15 and 25.

Speaker 2 And I asked him, if you take the concept of compounding growth of knowledge seriously, shouldn't you expect to be learning more in the last 10 years? And, you know, he said it's diminishing

Speaker 2 returns when it comes to learning. But I wonder if just the fact that the compounding just doesn't work because there's a lack of transfer once you know enough.

Speaker 1 Well, I don't think that I don't think compounding works

Speaker 1 generally. Like, I think compounding is this very seductive idea where

Speaker 1 you just get more and more returns.

Speaker 1 But really, the areas where there is true non-stop exponential growth are like vanishingly rare and they're vanishingly rare because when they apply they like totally transform the situation you're dealing with so like startup growth is an example of compounding return and it's where like one guy in his basement can rule the world after like after 10 years of of grinding or 20 years of grinding so like that's a situation that's fat you know vanishingly rare most things have kind of regions of exponential growth and then regions of diminishing returns i would say that you know classic Cowan economics thinking is that you tend to think in terms of diminishing returns.

Speaker 1 So that diminishing returns tends to be the kind of default way of viewing things that you get most of your growth in the beginning. But I think it's certainly about like truths about the world.

Speaker 1 There are some basic mental models or concepts which are very fundamental. And once you understand them, you kind of, you get like the 80-20, you get quite a bit of understanding.

Speaker 1 And then you get into like the esoterica of academia.

Speaker 1 And now suddenly they're like debating the finer points of some BS problem that doesn't really matter and like yeah spending a lot of time studying that may be necessary to advance the field but like clearly from a utilitarian standpoint of like where are you going to get the most benefit from your learning it was in that first phase and so maybe that's the kind of thesis and on ultra learning too is that um you know having kind of like okay i can capture the 60 of the value of like or utility of this field in a relatively short period of time because if i do kind of plan my learning out very effectively I can kind of capture it and I don't want to say that that's always the case and certainly for professional careers you often need to be in the top like 1% of a skill for it to matter at all so I do think there's differences but you know definitely there's the case that if you wanted to become good enough as a programmer to do a lot of your own programming for personal tasks but maybe you're not like what you do is programming full-time you could easily do that in a year like that's that's something a person could easily do in a year whereas the way people often think about it is, well, I have to go to school for four years and then maybe work in an office for, so I have to do it for like a decade to be good at it.

Speaker 1 And similarly with language learning, like, yeah, if you want to be able to lecture in a language or speak so fluently that like your entire life is lived in that language, then yeah, it's going to take you probably a decade.

Speaker 1 But you get to a level where like traveling in the country is pretty frictionless after maybe a couple months.

Speaker 1 And I think that's the kind of interesting zone of like, oh, I could get like decent at these skills in a, in a relatively short period of time.

Speaker 1 How does that change my calculus about what kinds of skills I pursue or what kinds of things I invest in in terms of projects?

Speaker 2 Does this diminishing returns apply to

Speaker 2 consecutive ultra-learning projects as well?

Speaker 2 I think you implied in the book that there's a cumulative advantage of doing one ultra-learning project and then you have the meta-skills and the confidence to go from one to another.

Speaker 1 Well, they're probably S curves. They're probably S curves.
They're probably a case that, like,

Speaker 1 you're if so, one of the main points that I try to make is that I think that there is this kind of compounding confidence curve.

Speaker 1 And especially at the beginning, which is sort of where I'm focused on, which is that if you've never done sort of aggressive self-directed learning projects before,

Speaker 1 and you try to do this, and I mean, you're reasonably smart, you have the kind of background

Speaker 1 of stick-to-itiveness to like actually get a project done and this kind of thing, which is not a small assumption, but I mean, I'm kind of assuming you have enough self-efficacy to like,

Speaker 1 okay, I'm going to sit and work on this for three months. And then you actually do it.
And it's not like a week later. And you're like, ah, I just threw that book in the garbage.
That was too boring.

Speaker 1 But if you're actually able to get through it and follow up on it and actually kind of do the things that I'm talking about in the book, then you can often get to this sort of like, oh, oh, wow, I didn't know that I could do that.

Speaker 1 Like, this is a lot of the people that I interviewed and I talked to who kind of went through this in the book. Like Tristan de Montebello was just this great example.

Speaker 1 I mean, his outcome was pretty extreme, but his his was kind of like, he was a, you know, kind of reasonably competent, smart guy, but he had never tried to do things this way before.

Speaker 1 And then he does them and he gets this huge result. And he's like, oh, this is like crazy.

Speaker 1 I could think of all these other types of projects that I could tackle now if I, if I was really serious about them.

Speaker 1 And so I think there's this sort of improvement, not only in your confidence, but in your overall strategy. You know, if you've learned.

Speaker 1 a couple languages, then learning more languages just becomes like this routine activity. I mean, it still takes you the same amount of time to get to like that level of mastery.

Speaker 1 But the way people feel and talk about, like, oh, I really want to learn Spanish, but I haven't made any progress in like five years, like, they don't deal with that, right?

Speaker 1 Like, okay, yeah, I'm going to work on Spanish, and I know I'll be able to get to a level where I'm having a conversation after, you know, a few months, just because that's just how it works, right?

Speaker 1 And so, I think that there is this benefit of getting this compounding. Now, if we're talking about like, do you just the people who become smarter just become this like eclipse level?

Speaker 1 And it's like that you know i don't know the johnny depp movie where he becomes like the he becomes the universe computer like no obviously not like there's obviously some kind of okay now you've learned and mastered sort of the edge of what we know about like performance from memory and so now you're doing little tweaks you know you're it's a little bit like i would say athletics is similar that if you've never gone running before

Speaker 1 And then someone first says, hey, there's this thing called jogging. And if you put your shoes on and you kind of run for a bit, like you can probably get quite a bit better for a while.

Speaker 1 Like there's quite a bit of gains. But then once you're at the level where you're, okay, you're regularly competing in, you know, marathons, you've run the Boston Marathon.

Speaker 1 Well, now you're kind of shaving seconds off your time. So there's probably an S curve there.
I think the argument I'd like to make is that like most people are before. the gains.

Speaker 1 They're the people who've like, I've maybe jogged a couple of times in my life, but they've never taken it seriously. So I think that for the intended audience, I think this book is that that's true.

Speaker 1 But I think, again, whenever we talk about compound growth, we just have to keep in mind that like an unending compound growth is a very, very scary thing in the world because it just implies that, you know, one person controls the entire universe or is smarter than every other person on earth.

Speaker 1 Like they tend to diminish at some point.

Speaker 2 You know, it's interesting. I had Robin Hanson on the podcast.

Speaker 2 He's written a series of blog posts about the long view, which is that we do have you can just invest in the stock market and like a million, you know, a thousand years down the line, you'll be like the richest person in the world by a big factor.

Speaker 2 And he asked, like, why is it not the case that some organization says, it doesn't matter if we die, we're just going to put like a couple million dollars in this fund and we're going to control the universe in a few thousand years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the classic reason for that is that that's one of those sort of engineering fallacies where it's sort of like, well, yeah, but obviously once an organization started to have that kind of power, not only would you have corruption from the inside so that like the human agents that are controlling the agency would start diverting the resources and breaking the company's mission.

Speaker 1 But everyone from the outside would start to kind of dominate it.

Speaker 1 Like, you don't just dominate the world without also having an army and also having like wide popular appeal and, like, doing this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And so, I mean, I could see some scenario where that happens where you're creating an organization that's like, like a new church or something where it like becomes the mass religion and then controls the universe.

Speaker 1 But there's no kind of secular,

Speaker 1 like, no, no kind of political ambitions organization that manages to concentrate so much wealth for thousands of years. And people are like, oh, yeah, well, we'll just honor that contract.

Speaker 1 So I do really think that,

Speaker 1 no disrespect to Robin Hanson, because I think he's a brilliant thinker, but

Speaker 1 I really admire him because he's the one who kind of like points out these sort of, well, why don't people just do this?

Speaker 1 And he has the kind of, he has the right kind of mind to even like consider things that seem absurd to normal people.

Speaker 1 But I would say that's the issue issue for something like that. And I think it's probably true for all kinds of compound growth.

Speaker 1 At some point, it has to stop.

Speaker 1 You can't just go on forever. But if there's some meaningful range where you get compound growth, even if it's a short range, it can still be super, super important to pay attention to.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let me intersperse some practical questions here. So following your advice, I've been

Speaker 2 on my own ultra-learning projects. When I'm learning,

Speaker 2 I sometimes have a lot of questions about like, how does this work on a deep level? Right. And I'm wondering whether you should,

Speaker 2 is there value in, first of all, getting the whole context, like kind of building a rough map? Or should you, as you're learning, kind of question each piece of knowledge as you're accumulating it?

Speaker 1 So I think the way I view sort of projects and learning projects in general is that they all kind of have to start with this,

Speaker 1 what does success look like? What is the outcome that I'm trying to generate from this learning project? Because

Speaker 1 analyzing things like this abstractly are hard because if you're optimizing for a different goal, the answer might be different, right?

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 you know, just even to take the language learning as an example,

Speaker 1 I found for the goals that I had that trying to figure out, let's say, the etymology of words or spending a lot of time figuring out where words come from and what it is, it quickly hits a point where you can be wasting a lot of time.

Speaker 1 so it quickly hits a point where okay yes but actually what i need to do is just memorize more words i don't need to like really dive deep on that that being said that's not a general principle like there's other subjects where i find that like the tendency is to not do enough depth like to not really go into it and understand things and so

Speaker 1 In my mind, that's just because the specific constraints of learning a language tend to suggest this is the right strategy, that that's the optimal strategy.

Speaker 1 Whereas, you know, learning physics, for instance, I think that the problem is just that most people don't get nearly enough depth, right?

Speaker 1 Like that they just understand the concepts too superficially. They're not seeing, they're seeing the pulleys, they're not seeing the conservation of energy.

Speaker 1 And so when you're asking about like what's the right way to approach a subject, I think it's really hard to do that in a goal-free setting.

Speaker 1 Like it's really hard to say, well, I want to learn physics the best way possible. I don't think there's really an answer to that.

Speaker 1 I think there's an answer to, well, I want to be able to pass these types of exams in my university classes the best way possible.

Speaker 1 Or I want to create groundbreaking, you know, physics research, or I want to be able to discuss physics intelligently to other physicists, or I want to, like, there's all these different kinds of goals where it would be like, okay, this suggests a different way of like building around this.

Speaker 1 And there are more robust strategies, so, like, a strategy that works better if you have multiple goals.

Speaker 1 So, if you not only want to pass your class, but you also want to be able to invent things, and like you have this sort of wider set of goals that you're considering.

Speaker 1 I do think that there are strategies that are more robust.

Speaker 1 So, like, if I'm learning Chinese, for instance, and my only goal is to look really good for 10 minutes of like an audio thing that I can prepare, then obviously the strategy is to script it and to rigorously practice and have someone take, like, is to actually not learn Chinese at all.

Speaker 1 But that's not a very robust plan.

Speaker 1 So like if I'm doing, like, I would never do a project that way, because to me, it's like, well, that's not really what you want to do, even if that was one of the outcomes that you wanted to have.

Speaker 1 But. I think that, you know, if you're learning Chinese and your goal is, well, I want to be able to talk to people versus I want to be able to read Confucius.

Speaker 1 Well, now you're talking about completely different strategies about going about it in my mind.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't think the, you know, even if there's some overlap, like the thing that you do to be able to read ancient Chinese texts and the thing that you do to be able to like, you know, chat with people on WeChat or something are totally different goals.

Speaker 1 And so.

Speaker 1 One of my main kind of points that I like to make is that like you can't even really begin to think about optimizing unless you're say like optimizing for what and learning tends to

Speaker 1 I think learners tend to kind of discount that just because they're sort of like well i want to know x or i want to learn this topic and

Speaker 1 sometimes those assumptions about that tend to be the problem out of curiosity take the example you gave of trying to be a groundbreaking researcher say you're Cal Newport and you're trying to make a new proof what is what is a strategy you use to learn at the cutting edge I'm just curious Well, again, I think that one of the key things there would be to specialize because, and you see this at like top-level researchers, why they specialize is because it's much easier to like your benefit of getting a breakthrough is going to be, well, there's going to be some ideas that are closely related to what I'm doing, and I need to have them at like an extremely high level of fluency.

Speaker 1 And there's a drop-off curve of like the value of ideas the further away it goes.

Speaker 1 And so if you have a really, really high level of specialization in a field, then you probably are kind of at the cutting edge for techniques and stuff. And so you can find problems to work on.

Speaker 1 Now, that's a little bit of a different issue from, okay, I want to be an Albert Einstein or something like this. That I think is

Speaker 1 part of it, I think, is just luck. You have to be in a fertile territory.

Speaker 1 But I think you also are kind of looking for, well, because everyone else is specializing, then I have to do something competitively unique. So, I mean, this is also another consideration as well.

Speaker 1 Like you have the whole kind of, we're talking about this like everyone else in the world doesn't exist, but the fact that everyone in the world is also also kind of pursuing some sort of strategy can sometimes mean that doing something that's sort of objectively suboptimal, but is kind of

Speaker 1 nobody does that, I think gives an advantage. I think even my own life is an example of that, that like,

Speaker 1 you know, obviously it's better if you can actually go to MIT and get an MIT degree and get the alumni network and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But the fact that nobody was doing the MIT challenge gave me kind of a claim to fame. Like if only one person is doing it, that makes me kind of more unique.

Speaker 1 So the value to my career has probably been higher than getting an MIT degree. But I mean, if every single person was doing the MIT challenge, there's hundreds of thousands of people doing it.

Speaker 1 Well, then, okay, maybe the difference changes. So I think there is a sort of strategic role in how you learn things.

Speaker 1 But again, I think one of the things I talk about in the book is sort of, all right, given the kind of goal that I'm optimizing for, how do successful people do it?

Speaker 1 And so, again, you go to academia and you say, all right,

Speaker 1 how do I make things that inch forward the field? Well, you have to specialize. You have to figure out, okay, what's a problem that I will understand the best in the world?

Speaker 1 And then I can find ways that I can make improvements over it. And that's how our whole academic system is organized.
And there's sort of no surprise for that.

Speaker 1 That may not be the thing that we want as a society. Maybe we want these sort of weird cross-pollinating insights that no one saw coming out of left field.
But I think

Speaker 1 as just a pure strategy on your own of just doing it, you're definitely going to get into situations where, okay, well, I learned these two things and there's no obvious overlap, and so I've mastered two, like it's been kind of useless, right?

Speaker 1 So, uh, there it's it's hard to pick those two things, it's hard to figure out, okay, what are the like insights that when I when I breed these two ideas together, I get like a super idea, not just some like garbage idea that's like actually much worse than what people are currently doing.

Speaker 2 Um, the MIT challenge, is that an example of the failed simulation effect? I'll let you explain what that is, but is it that because it's a rare thing to do,

Speaker 2 that it just it seems much more impressive? It's hard to like simulate in your mind?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the failed simulation effect comes from a good friend Cal Newport, and the failed simulation effect was from his book, How to Become a High School Superstar.

Speaker 1 And the idea was that the impressiveness to which we assign things is not based on how much work that thing requires, but on how hard it is for us to imagine doing that.

Speaker 1 So, his example is that, like, if you're in like 14 different clubs and you're like the president of the debate team and you're on mathletes and you did a bunch of AP courses and this kind of stuff, that's objectively a ton of work.

Speaker 1 Like, it's like to be, you know, the high school valedatorian, do those things, it's a lot of work. But we can imagine ourselves just being a grind doing all of that.

Speaker 1 Whereas when we see someone, let's say, like, you know, one of the examples he gives is a mutual friend of ours, Manish Setsi, who published a book for programming for teens, like like through an actual publisher that sold fairly well when he was in high school.

Speaker 1 And like, that's the kind of thing, like, I can't imagine doing that. Like, I don't know

Speaker 1 how does a grade 11 kid do that, right?

Speaker 1 And so that makes him seem much more impressive, even if, you know, the amount of work is like strictly less than the amount of work that it takes for someone else to do.

Speaker 1 Now, I think the MIT challenge is a little bit of that example

Speaker 1 because it's clearly something that like the reason people found it impressive is that when they imagine doing it, they can't imagine doing it themselves. And maybe I get the benefit of that.

Speaker 1 I don't know whether there's the technique that Cal talks about where you're kind of like,

Speaker 1 he sort of talks about how you kind of make these sort of inroads into a field and then you find new opportunities.

Speaker 1 And so that the issue is just that there's all this kind of serendipity that pushes you forward to an outcome that people wouldn't have expected.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure whether that's true with the MIT challenge. I mean, I can explain how I did it.
And it's not like someone else could attempt attempt it.

Speaker 1 There isn't a lot of like, well, I just happened to find the right guy at MIT who gave me access to, it wasn't like that. I just did it.
But I think that

Speaker 1 at least in the sort of idea of like, why do people find it interesting? Certainly because of that. I think I also benefit from the fact that

Speaker 1 if I had done like just some middle of the road university's computer science curriculum, people would be like, whole hum about it. But I mean, most of the work is just doing the curriculum.

Speaker 1 It's not the fact that it's MIT. Like I only picked MIT because they post their material online for free.

Speaker 1 Like if, you know, the University of, I don't know, like Wisconsin's computer science program uploaded their material, I could have used theirs too, and people would have been less impressed.

Speaker 1 I think I'm really kind of sneakily leveraging the fact that people associate MIT with being super, super smart. And that's because of how stringent their application process is.

Speaker 1 And that's the very thing I didn't do when I did this project. So I definitely, you know, looking back on it, like I definitely am proud of the project.

Speaker 1 But to me, it's kind of funny that like that's the thing that people fixate on because,

Speaker 1 you know, I also really like the language learning project, but it definitely, I think the MIT challenge is the one that captivates people for some reason.

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah, I'm studying computer science at UT and our curriculum is there's like classes where the programming assignments, they're hard to code up.

Speaker 2 So they literally just copy them off of the Stanford programming assignments.

Speaker 2 Like if you're the kind of student, and of course I'm not, if you're the kind of student who wants to copy answers off the internet, you would would just look up like Stanford, CS, whatever, whatever, and that's you'd find it there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's interesting.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's another thing, too, that came in my favor is that MIT's computer science program is very math and theory-based, which means that it's intellectually more difficult.

Speaker 1 So it's like harder to understand the MIT curriculum. Like, you know, when they're doing analyses, they just assume everyone knows calculus, whereas in university, sometimes they'll go easy on you.

Speaker 1 Like, they won't make you do the calculus, whereas they make you do the calculus in every MIT class.

Speaker 1 Like you take the intro microeconomics class, like when I did it in my school, they never made you do the calculus.

Speaker 1 They were always like, well, you find the intersection on this graph or something like this.

Speaker 1 Whereas in MIT, it's like, okay, so now we take this integral of this and find the, you know, the Laplacian of this.

Speaker 1 Like they just do that in MIT because they assume everyone has a very strong kind of math background.

Speaker 1 However, the way that works into your advantage is that like in a lot of other universities, CS programs, they have these really long, tedious programming assignments, whereas MIT, like, they really hit the sweet spot of like, this is difficult, but not a long amount of work.

Speaker 1 So when I did the project initially, it was, well, I'm only going to do the final exams. Like, that was the idea.
Just final exams, nothing else.

Speaker 1 And that was sort of my justification for like, could you do it in a year?

Speaker 1 Because, well, you have to learn it and you have to do a hard final exam, but you don't have to do all this other like busy work that you have done in school.

Speaker 1 You don't have to do every single problem set or essays or, you know, group projects and stuff.

Speaker 1 And I was getting some flack in the beginning, like it was like the first week or two about like, well, why not the programming assignments?

Speaker 1 But it just turns out that you can add the programming assignments to that challenge and it doesn't materially change the amount of work.

Speaker 1 Like I probably only added like an extra week or two to my schedule to also do the programming assignments, just because, you know, you do the programming assignments and they're very tight at MIT.

Speaker 1 Whereas, you know, people were questioning me because they went to different CS programs and they're like, well, I spend months working on this program assigned. There's no way you could do it.

Speaker 1 And it's sort of like, well, that's not how MIT does their course.

Speaker 1 They're like, it's all like proof by induction induction, and you're doing things, like it's all like drawing graphs on pencil and paper.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, from a practical point of view, do you want to do the heavy programming assignments to become a real programmer? Yeah, probably.

Speaker 1 But I think if your goal was, could I get the kind of high-theory sort of conceptual education of MIT, then I think it works.

Speaker 1 And to be honest, because I'm not a practicing programmer, I just program for fun. The conceptual stuff is really where all the value is for me.

Speaker 1 Like knowing how to design websites is not super valuable for me, but understanding how like information works in general actually translates really well when you're understanding like cognitive science and stuff.

Speaker 1 So I'm actually glad that I did it that way, but I mean my preferences are probably different from people who are like, well, you study CES, so you could get a computer science job so you could be a programmer so you can, you know, do that.

Speaker 1 And that was just a different situation for me.

Speaker 2 Can you explain that?

Speaker 2 How does the knowledge about computation, you know, how to encode and transmit computational information, how does that relate to the research you do or the research you read in cognitive science?

Speaker 1 Oh, I mean, like, cognitive science is like

Speaker 1 explicitly overlaps with computer science. I mean, cognitive science as a discipline is usually philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, right?

Speaker 1 Like artificial intelligence and stuff.

Speaker 1 And so when you're reading papers that are talking about, like, I remember one paper I was reading, which don't ask me to cite it because I've lost the link now, but it was a guy talking about a computational model for how chunking works.

Speaker 1 And I mean, if I didn't have a background in understanding computer science, this would be a very difficult paper to read because he's talking about how, well, you make these nodes and then you make these links, and that's how you can represent a data structure of conceptual information.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you've only done like, you know, psych classes, this is a kind of a hard paper to understand. But if you've

Speaker 1 spent classes doing algorithms where you're trying to design systems that do just that, then it makes sense to you. It's like a natural language.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, yeah, that's a linked list, or oh, yeah, that's a tree structure.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, that's, you know, that's doing this thing, right?

Speaker 1 That's a graph or this, like you understand that. And I think

Speaker 1 similarly, I think that like,

Speaker 1 you know, I was just doing a lot of research on motivation, for instance, and there's all this stuff in neuroscience about

Speaker 1 like the motor loop, which is this sort of basic kind of circuit motif that runs through the basal ganglia.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of how you're like, you have all this stuff going on in your brain at the same time. So it's like, how does your brain decide to do one and only one thing?

Speaker 1 Because you've got like a billion neurons and they're all firing all at the same time. And so it's this pattern that basically just don't lock everything except the one thing that you want to do.

Speaker 1 And so, yes, this is a kind of neuroscience idea, but you can really visualize it in terms of like, oh, like if you had to design a circuit to do this, this is very similar to electrical engineering, where it's sort of like we need to amplify one pattern and like, you know, you have to run it through a filter, and there's like this center-surround pattern.

Speaker 1 And anyway, there's lots of stuff like that, but to me, that's not the how do I program stuff in JavaScript.

Speaker 1 That is a understanding, this kind of abstract theory level, which, I mean, we were talking about low ability for transfer, but it's more just that you have to kind of get these abstract ideas in both domains for it to work.

Speaker 1 And most people don't do that.

Speaker 2 Right, right. It also sounds like OS and time scheduling.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 going back to transfer, because you did mention that, but it does seem that

Speaker 1 your career in terms of the learning you're doing, you're doing it explicitly because you see a high potential of transfer between the research you're now doing and the computer science you did before.

Speaker 2 Why are you pessimistic about transfer in general when it's well I mean we have tons of studies showing that

Speaker 1 that like people who attend classes don't transfer a lot of what they learn to the outside world.

Speaker 1 So again, it goes back to my Einstein point where I was making that like if you see data which says that X doesn't work for almost all people

Speaker 1 you should be skeptical of that as a general method for being successful at X, right? Like I mean it just definitely raises the question of whether or not it's successful.

Speaker 1 And it's not just that this only impacts kind of like, well, universities are full of like dull, uninspired students, but if like you're the bright student, then you'll do well.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, one of the studies that I quoted in there was that people who were honors level physics students could not solve problems that differed superficially from the ones that they had studied.

Speaker 1 And so.

Speaker 1 Again, this specificity with the brain kind of comes down to this idea that like, yes, there is this kind of ability for trans for you to be able to do this, but that's kind of like the magical bonus that happens sometimes when you're lucky but the base reality is is that when you learn most skills they they adhere quite specifically to the context you learn them in and when you're doing it so if you're budgeting for a learning project where you're trying to accomplish a particular goal and you're you're you're sort of like flowchart of how you're going to do it is do this thing that's unrelated to what I want to be good at.

Speaker 1 Then the magic transfer happens. And then at the end, I'm able to perform this skill.
That's like a really bad like flowchart for doing this.

Speaker 1 What you should do is be like, okay, how do I line these up?

Speaker 1 And so I think learning broadly, learning for the ability to have these sort of mental models or concepts or deeper understandings of things, like I'm a big supporter of that.

Speaker 2 I do a lot of that.

Speaker 1 Like I learn lots of different subjects in the off chance that I'll be able to get one of those deep insights. Now,

Speaker 1 I think if we're learning for this sort of concrete purpose, though, it's really useful to think of it in that way it's very useful to think about it okay what is it that allows me to perform in the way that i want to be able to perform and so as soon as i'm learning for a task i adjust how i'm approaching things for that task right so if i'm doing a research uh paper i know what i'm trying to get out of things and how i'm trying to read stuff and i'm not doing something that's totally unrelated um and so i think uh the directness idea just sort of goes to the fact that yes it is good to learn lots of things and i think that if you do learn lots of things just through sheer volume, you're going to get some of this nice transfer effects.

Speaker 1 And I'm not even really against learning broadly.

Speaker 1 Like, I think you could kind of a close reading of ultra-learning could be seen as like a kind of anti-David Epstein range kind of thesis, but that's not really my point.

Speaker 1 My point isn't that like you should only learn really narrow, specialized things and like that's the only thing that matters, but simply that once you decide on what a goal is, it always makes more sense to approach it directly.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 the kind of having this broad base to build off of is also good in general, but that's a little bit different from I'm trying to accomplish X.

Speaker 1 So do the thing that leads to X as opposed to something that like, well, I don't want to do that. That's too hard.

Speaker 1 I'm going to do this other thing that's kind of this, you know, nonsense thing, right?

Speaker 2 Two questions. So first, did you,

Speaker 2 when you were doing the MIT challenge, did you,

Speaker 2 did you have the goal to

Speaker 2 Were you going in with the goal of having these transfer effects? Or were you just trying to learn about programming and computer science directly?

Speaker 1 I feel like a lot of the assumptions that I went in going to the MIT challenge did not bear out. So there is a weird sort of bittersweet quality to that.

Speaker 1 Like the thing that people fixate on that, like I did it, is the part that I think was pretty successful.

Speaker 1 I mean, you could look through my exams and deem that my sort of scores weren't high enough for your standards or something. But like in the general sense, I think I accomplished that.

Speaker 1 But my idea going into the project was that I just finished university. I'm the kind of, you know, like like yourself, I was a student up until that point.
And school has been my life, right?

Speaker 1 Like when you're in university, all you know is school. And it seemed like this was a huge part of my life.

Speaker 1 And it seemed like this was a huge opportunity that, like, why aren't more people doing this?

Speaker 1 Why aren't more people, you know, this was pre-reading about like kind of all the signaling stories and kind of my general level of cynicism about university in general.

Speaker 1 I was just kind of like, this is, you know, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, you could do do it for free.

Speaker 1 Like they're just giving this away and you could get this knowledge and you could learn it. And I was interested in learning computer science.

Speaker 1 I had already learned some programming before. So I did know some programming, but I didn't know like academic CS.
And I was thinking about going back to school to study it.

Speaker 1 Like I was thinking about doing

Speaker 1 like going back as a mature student and doing another undergrad in computer science. And so this just seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Speaker 1 And because I had a blog and because I was kind of commenting on student and educational issues, it just felt like, you know, is this, is just, am I crazy? Why has no one done this before?

Speaker 1 Like, why am I like, and if I'm going to be the first person doing this, like, presumably there's going to be, you know, millions to follow, right? So it seemed very exciting.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like, this is going to be the road to how everyone's going to do or how a substantial amount of people are going to do education in the future. Now.

Speaker 1 Nothing has changed. I know of very few people who have kind of done anything like the MIT challenge to that scope.
I know a handful of people that have done their own similar-ish kind of projects.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure there's people I don't know of that did things that were similar, but certainly not the massive waves that I had predicted.

Speaker 1 And so in that sense, it's a little bit like, okay, it didn't quite work out how I was wanting it to work out. But I think at the kind of...

Speaker 1 the more object level, like not my kind of implications of the project, but like what the project actually was, I think it was pretty successful, you know, and I did learn a lot of programming.

Speaker 1 I did do programming after. Don't get me wrong, but I think if my goal had been,

Speaker 1 I want to get the like the entry-level computer programming job that is like, you know, would be the path to a career there, I would have done it a little differently.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean, the MIT education kind of primes you more for working on not the routine stuff most programmers are working on.

Speaker 1 It would be more like priming you for working on kind of harder programming problems.

Speaker 1 So it would have been like a good jumping off point if I wanted to get into, you know, a certain branches of programming where it's sort of like, okay, this is harder to do.

Speaker 1 Like the average programmer just doesn't know how to do it, like because it's kind of complicated and the math is hard and things like that. But

Speaker 1 I mean, I think it would have not been a bad way to get a foothold into a job, the same way that getting an actual CS degree is a good foothold into a job, even though the skills are not exactly the same.

Speaker 1 I think one of the benefits of having done it, though, is just that after you see the mental models and the ideas, you kind of have, oh, these are these abstract patterns that I can apply.

Speaker 1 But I mean, economics also has a lot of those patterns, and I didn't do a degree in that, but I feel like I get a lot of value out of those too.

Speaker 2 Yeah. When you were learning,

Speaker 2 was there a specific way you geared your education so that you would maximize the potential of transfer learning?

Speaker 1 Well, I think the more you understand things, the better you get transfer. So this kind of goes back to this intuition chunking idea, but like the way transfer works.
And I mean, I'm using a model.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not saying that this is like a scientifically proven thing, but this is just sort of how I visualize it abstractly based on what I've read.

Speaker 1 But the idea is if you think of this kind of hierarchical model where you have kind of like at the very low level, there's sort of very superficial features of the things that you're encountering.

Speaker 1 And then there's increasingly abstract features about the problem. And chunking is this kind of finding abstract and more abstract patterns, right?

Speaker 1 So you're, oh, this is a problem of this type is an example of like, that's not obvious unless you have this, all these base patterns to notice that that's what's going on and so um the idea here is that understanding is this process understanding is this process of kind of building hierarchies of of information that go deeper and deeper into understanding and so those tend to be the things that transfer better because um the more you understand a quite abstract feature of a problem the more you can spot it in other domains that you've understood enough to get to a place where you could see that that's the pattern that follows.

Speaker 1 And so, if I were to contrast

Speaker 1 a different way of learning, like a different way that was just focused on,

Speaker 1 well, I want to have high exam performance, so I'm just going to like memorize the most common solution types and just memorize how to do them.

Speaker 1 And I don't understand why it works, but I'm going to just do it that way. I think in MIT classes, that's probably a bad strategy just because there's too much diversity of problems.

Speaker 1 Like, I think that in some schools,

Speaker 1 they do actually teach that way

Speaker 1 because the students can't perform like the kind of novel problems on exam solution sets and I mean there are exceptions MIT did use some like oh this was seen in a previous assignment set so if I had done that problem I had a leg up but I mean most of the exams you do they give you kind of novel problems so you have to have like a minimum level of understanding but I mean my general approach to learning is to focus on understanding over memorization I mean, I'm using some examples as exceptions.

Speaker 1 I mean, there are some things that like in language learning, for instance, that I focus on performance over understanding.

Speaker 1 But I mean, generally, if you're focusing on understanding, that's probably going to lead to better transfer than if you're focusing on memorization.

Speaker 1 And that had long been a bias in how I approached learning things.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, there is probably a case to be made that if you were strictly concerned with performance on an immediately subsequent exam, you could sometimes get better performance with just memorizing.

Speaker 1 But I mean, even with like a long curriculum, like, you know, they assume you understand the Fourier transform in later classes.

Speaker 1 So if you just kind of like, well, I'm just going to memorize the equation, but you don't really understand what it does, then you get to something later and it just doesn't make any sense to you.

Speaker 1 And you're like, ah, crap, I have to go back down and understand this. So I do think the more that you like really understand ideas and really understand the principles behind them.

Speaker 1 And if you, if you have that as a kind of an aim, then you're learning for better transfer, I think.

Speaker 1 And I think it just happens to be sort sort of probably the optimal approach for doing like complex exams like MIT, but certainly not for all schools.

Speaker 1 But I generally recommend it anyways, because, you know, what's the point of just getting a good mark on an exam if you don't know anything after that's like useful for anything else, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Let me ask you about focus.

Speaker 2 You say in the book.

Speaker 2 Oh, shoot. Hold on one second.
You say in the book that I'm agnostic about whether focus can be trained as an ability in general.

Speaker 2 Now, unless I'm misunderstanding this out of context,

Speaker 2 this seems to contradict Cal Newport's book on deep work.

Speaker 1 Am I missing that? Well, I mean, and I mean, Cal and I are good friends, and we co-instruct a course on focus. So, there's a certain sense where

Speaker 1 we are in agreement on the trainability of focus. Where I'm maybe, maybe I would disagree with Cal somewhat is that I think Cal views it from a capacity point of view.

Speaker 1 So it's like he's using the kind of muscle metaphor for focus.

Speaker 1 And, you know, all the research I've done on transfer really suggests that that's not the right way of thinking about the brain, is this muscle metaphor?

Speaker 1 Like, for instance, doing brain training games that improve working memory don't help your working memory for things that aren't brain training games.

Speaker 1 So it's kind of one of those things that if you did a muscle analogy and said, well, I'm going to improve my working memory, you're kidding yourself because that's not how it works.

Speaker 1 Now, you can improve your working memory for probably pretty specific things, like chunking is an example of that, or by you know, developing quite specific strategies.

Speaker 1 So the question when we're talking about focus is what kind of thing are we talking about here?

Speaker 1 So if we're talking about the capacity for you to focus, like a kind of a cognitive ability, I think it's doubtful that you could

Speaker 1 robustly improve that particular faculty just by doing specific training. You could probably improve it in specific ways, but they're going to be again specific.

Speaker 1 So you could improve your ability to like

Speaker 1 focus in on maybe like certain types of problems because you've built up a kind of like sort of quite specific cognitive strategies for doing that now that being said well why why even talk about focus at all if if i don't think it can be improved because i think that when we talk about focus casually we're not just talking about a kind of cognitive faculty we're also talking about well what are all the habits and routines and strategies and

Speaker 1 affective processes that influence focus.

Speaker 1 So the reason most people can't focus isn't because their brain is incapable of focusing, it's because their phone's buzzing or because they're like, ah, this is boring and I'm getting distracted and I don't like enjoy what I'm learning or I don't find it interesting.

Speaker 1 So people lump a lot of things together.

Speaker 1 So if I were to be writing like a scientific paper and I was trying to like, you know, making a bet on whether a scientific paper would find that there's like focus training programs improve the ability to focus.

Speaker 1 in the way that cognitive psychologists typically measure, I'd be a little bit pessimistic about it just because they're probably measuring it in this tightly controlled experimental setting.

Speaker 1 If I were talking about, are there ways that we could robustly reduce procrastination, reduce distraction, reduce the ability to like get frustrated and give up or like want to, you know, waste your time on something else, then yeah, I think that's totally trainable.

Speaker 1 I think that that's something that you probably could improve on. And so.

Speaker 1 Again, Cal Newport tends to take more of a facultative approach with some of these things, and I'm more skeptical of that.

Speaker 1 But I think for for the average person what is the message and I think the message is you ought to focus more and I think there's probably aspects that a normal person probably ascribes to being the ability to focus that you could improve oh this is very interesting

Speaker 2 but but when Cal Newport says in deep work and that you know your the other things to do in your day after you're done with work you know your phone your TV that those diminish your faculty to focus on your actual work.

Speaker 1 Is this model wrong?

Speaker 1 is it am i free to do whatever i think it's i think the way it's stated is probably too crude to like well what's the model that that he has in mind there so and again i think like as a practical consequence yeah maybe i i don't know the research so much on that um i think it is potentially possible at least to have like tons and tons of focus in your working hours and then just be like in this buzz on twitter all day i'm a little bit less pessimistic than cal is that like, well, that's going to destroy your brain in a kind of way.

Speaker 1 I don't know that that's true. But what I will say is that what I think is going on is that from a motivational perspective, Twitter is like the variable reinforcement schedule.

Speaker 1 It's the Skinner box that like gives you the rewards intermittently. And so you're willing to press it like constantly and perpetually all the time.

Speaker 1 And so if you're choosing between Twitter and reading this hard book, then like the motivational gradient is going to be to go on Twitter all the time. Right.

Speaker 1 And so when we're talking about focus there, is that a cognitive capacity or is that just like your affective ability to like choose this harder thing?

Speaker 1 And so if Cal's talking about focus in that way, which I think he is, then I kind of agree with him that

Speaker 1 if you're not on Twitter, if you don't have these variable ratio reinforcement schedules that are constantly like, ooh, it would be more fun to be on YouTube right now.

Speaker 1 Ooh, it would be more fun to check my phone right now. Like if you don't have those things constantly as active primed habits in

Speaker 1 behavioral repertoire, it is easier to focus on reading a hard book. And I think that's the way you could get better at reading a book.

Speaker 1 But as the ability to, like, for instance, I'm skeptical of people who say, well, I meditate for an hour a day. And so therefore, I'm going to have enhanced focus capacity.

Speaker 1 Because to me, that sounds like the brain training thing, which we know to be false.

Speaker 1 But if we're talking about, well, I'm removing a lot of these distracting options from my kind of like list of habitual responses to things, will that allow me to sustain endurance and persistence on harder activities?

Speaker 1 I think that's probably true. So that's my take.

Speaker 2 Is a way to think about the analogy here that you have certain forms of exercise like cross-training that don't seem to be highly correlated with other physical activities or performance of other physical activities.

Speaker 2 But then you have some, or you can take whatever example you want there.

Speaker 2 But there's some things like weightlifting, which seem to be strongly correlated with your ability to play football or soccer or whatever. there is meditation

Speaker 2 if there's a distinction there? I don't know if there is, but if there is one, can an activity like meditation be in the productive sector?

Speaker 1 Well, I think meditation can be good, but I think it's important to know what meditation is for. And I feel like a lot of the research on meditation is quite poor.

Speaker 1 I say this as a non-researcher, so I'm certainly going to get in shit for it because, like, people are, people are like, the problem with meditation is that the people who like meditation, and I mean, I've been on multiple meditation retreats.

Speaker 1 I've done meditation daily for periods of months so i'm not like just some guy who didn't get it and like i understand why people meditate but the problem is a little bit that like it it is very tied in with the essentially religion it's buddhism and so i think that that can sometimes you know i don't like attacking anyone's spiritual beliefs and there is a really strong philosophical component to meditation and to what the right way to live life is and stuff.

Speaker 1 And so I don't want to say like, oh, you shouldn't meditate or like people who meditate, that's bad. I think it's more

Speaker 1 sometimes you need to question the very specific claims as stated. And so one of the specific claims is that because I meditate for an hour every day, I'm going to be much more focused.

Speaker 1 And I don't know whether that's true. Maybe it is.
If it is, it's definitely not the mental model I have of how the mind works.

Speaker 1 But I think that when we're talking about does Twitter destroy your ability to concentrate, I think that the mechanism for a statement like that to potentially be true is that Twitter is super appealing, it is super enticing, and if it is one of the kind of default habitual responses you have at any moment, you have to put in a lot of energy resisting that, right?

Speaker 1 Like if you think about like in an era before television, people could regularly like sit and listen to long radio programs. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like that was a regular like sit around the table and listen to radio. We don't do that anymore.
And why? I think probably because visual media is maybe a little bit more compelling.

Speaker 1 And similarly, you know, when novels were the only kind of form of entertainment, people would like binge read novels who maybe now would be like binge watching reality TV or

Speaker 1 on Facebook or something. And so as technology has developed, we've developed increasingly enticing options.

Speaker 1 And so the more you engage in those habitually, I think the more it is hard to reduce that impulse.

Speaker 1 Like if you eat junk food all the time, it's going to be hard in a particular moment to be like, I'm going to eat this kale salad rather than a hamburger because

Speaker 1 your kind of context that you're in is like, oh, you know what would be better right now, the hamburger.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you never eat junk food or you only eat it in like very limited contexts, and it's just sort of like, well, I just eat kale salads for lunch, right?

Speaker 1 Like it just, it just makes sense for you to do that. It doesn't require willpower.
And so I think of it more in this way, but I mean, Cal has his own mental model of how this works.

Speaker 1 And I'm not really a debating type. So if he disagrees with me, me, he disagrees with me.
I just, this is just sort of my kind of layman interpretation of what I've read about cognitive seconds.

Speaker 2 Can we go back to the MIT challenge? Because I just remember that article you wrote about why people are getting so much better at Tetris.

Speaker 2 And you talked about how somebody did the four-minute mile, and then now you have hundreds of people who have been the four-minute mile. People have done it in high school.

Speaker 2 Why has it not happened with the MIT challenge?

Speaker 2 They see somebody can get a STEM degree at MIT online. And now everybody's like, I can do it in six months.

Speaker 1 I have some regrets about that article. And the regret I have is that I, like, it was one of those things where I should have just focused on one explainer and I just threw in the bannister thing.

Speaker 1 And now I regret it. Because actually, someone pointed out to me that the bannister thing apparently wasn't true.

Speaker 1 That like the if you look at the, I don't have the link for it, but they were like, did some of my research, like, that's like a commonly quoted thing that, like, you broke the barrier.

Speaker 1 And if you look at like trend lines for performance and stuff, it wasn't the case that, like, oh, they needed an example like it was just that uh we were just generally innovating in in kind of the mile long running and it was generally going down like this and so i don't know i don't know the full argument but they were basically refuting that idea that this just sort of like needing an example to do something there seems to be something to it at the very least that like

Speaker 1 a lot of innovation is the difficulty of just like coming up with an idea, but like once you're aware an idea exists, it's like, oh, that's one of the things I could do.

Speaker 1 But I don't know whether it's the case, as I was sort of claiming in that article, perhaps mistakenly, that like a known barrier, just knowing that it has been surmounted, allows people to perform better.

Speaker 1 Like, just knowing that someone has done X in this time without knowing how they did it, or like having some kind of like detail of their method, which may require some innovation to figure out, is enough.

Speaker 1 And so, like, the kind of what I wish I had focused on in that article and only made about it because it's super interesting is the speedrunning community, which

Speaker 1 like I'm not like super into, like I don't do any speedrunning and I don't really even play video games.

Speaker 1 But speedrunning as a kind of cultural phenomenon is just fascinating to me and it's extra fascinating to me because it's kind of seen as sort of low status.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, this is a bunch of guys in their basement on Twitch playing games. But I just think like this is like, people should be studying this.

Speaker 1 Like there should be academic papers written about this. Because the Tetris example I gave, which is that Tetris was really, really popular in like the late 80s, early 90s.

Speaker 1 You know, the whole world was playing it and people were bad at it. Like, they weren't that good.
And now there's this much smaller group of people playing who are insane.

Speaker 1 They're now playing like a level which it like glitches out the game. So you can't even see the blocks falling.
And you can like, it's going so fast, but also the entire level is glitched out.

Speaker 1 So you can't even see what's happening. And they're like beating those levels and stuff.
It's crazy. And

Speaker 1 I think what this shows is that this isn't just kind of a natural phenomenon where you're seeing, ah, this is how innovation happens.

Speaker 1 This is how we make kind of learning progress in society is through these sort of network structures that a few key innovations unlocked this kind of explosion in performance growth for a field because all of a sudden, you know, the

Speaker 1 original way that speedrunning worked is it was through these sort of magazines or like these kind of old school 1990s websites where people would just like have someone verify it and then they would publish it.

Speaker 1 So I don't know, like, I'm not an expert on the, on the movement, but I think there was some kind of magazine that they would publish, like, sort of like some of the best times and stuff.

Speaker 1 The problem is you can't learn from that.

Speaker 1 So, what switched up and what changed, I think, the entire domain was that the proof for that you got a particular speedrun time was to post live stream footage of you doing it.

Speaker 1 And this turns out to be a game breaker because now anyone who wants to see what you did can watch it. So,

Speaker 1 it's one of those things where like not only, it's like the patent system a little bit, like not only to get the patent, you have to show how it works, right?

Speaker 1 And so you're allowing people to innovate on it.

Speaker 1 And so I'm very interested in this kind of sociological aspect of learning because I think, you know, I'm a big fan of a lot of the work on like kind of progress studies and stuff, just the idea that we are not innovating at the rate that we should and at the rate that arguably we ought to be innovating at if we want to solve big problems like global warming and hunger and poverty and disease and pandemics and things like this, that we ought to be innovating a lot more.

Speaker 1 And so understanding the kind of, you know, this was not something I talked about in ultra-learning because it was all about like kind of psychology and cognitive science, but the sociological aspects of innovation and learning are really fascinating to me.

Speaker 1 And, you know, another book I recommend is David Wooden's,

Speaker 1 I think it's called The Invention of Science.

Speaker 1 I might be, it might be the history, invention of science, I think. And he's a historian who goes through kind of the scientific revolution.

Speaker 1 and you know this is just one perspective but like he kind of points out that there were cultural shifts triggered by very particular events happening that created just the right kind of mechanism that created science so it's very weird to think of science as an invention um because it's a lot of it's just obvious to us right now but he kind of goes through rigorously how like

Speaker 1 European languages didn't have a word for discovery until Christopher Columbus discovered the new world because culturally it was assumed that the ancients knew everything and there was nothing known that they didn't already know, hadn't already figured out.

Speaker 1 It was just about like, well, let's make sense of their theories. And so Christopher Columbus, discovering the new world, that there was something new to discover was itself kind of an innovation.

Speaker 1 And that the printing press, for instance, changed the culture from a manuscript culture to a book culture.

Speaker 1 And being a book culture created facts, because all of a sudden, what was written in a book would be fixed and stay for all time.

Speaker 1 So you could point to so-and-so wrote this in this particular book in a way that, you know, the ancients were often dubious of experimental evidence because it was just this kind of like, well, you know, things change and you thought this one day and you think this the other day, and you need to have some indelible record of what someone said in one moment to even make that process possible.

Speaker 1 And so, he talks about this, and I think this is sort of goes into this idea that, like, I think speedrunning, which maybe I'm wrong, but I think speedrunning is a really culturally underrated force because it is, I think that's a real innovation that in order to claim credit for a particular accomplishment, you must post video, a video record of you doing it,

Speaker 1 which is not true for most fields.

Speaker 1 Like I just think that this is a real lost opportunity that like, why don't we have in a lot of, like even within a company, like even within Google or something, why don't we have, well, the best programmers who are competing for the top for being the best programmers are constantly on a live stream of what they're programming.

Speaker 1 You know? Yeah. I mean, it could be a little bit harder because, I mean, there are some certain factors about speedruns that make them kind of amenable to this.

Speaker 1 So maybe there's additional innovations I'm missing.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that people at Google and stuff have thought about this, but my feeling is just that this sociological sort of pattern of like how we gain knowledge, not as an individual, but as society, I think is fascinating.

Speaker 1 And I think it's,

Speaker 1 we haven't even scratched the surface of all the ways that technology could assist assist that.

Speaker 1 So that's a different problem for like, how do we, you know, disseminate what is the college curriculum to a larger group of people?

Speaker 1 That's a totally different problem than how do we actually innovate and improve things in society.

Speaker 2 That's fascinating. By the way, you get a 10 out of 10 on an interesting tangent there going from speed running to the enlightenment.

Speaker 2 But have you heard of George Hotz, by the way?

Speaker 1 No, maybe you can tell me what.

Speaker 2 Okay, so he's a guy who does exactly this.

Speaker 2 He was the first kid when he was 17 to jailbreak an iPhone, first person to jailbreak a PS2. And now he does live streams on YouTube all the time.
He's like folding the COVID proteins.

Speaker 2 He's doing leak code problems. He's, you know, there is

Speaker 1 a kind of nascent community of Twitch streamers and live streamers for certain things. Part of me suspects that there's additional ingredients that are necessary to make this apply beyond

Speaker 1 normal problems. Like I even did a live stream project.
I was so excited about this kind of thing that

Speaker 1 I did a live stream project for quantum mechanics. And admittedly, I was a little bit kind of lukewarm on the result.
I think,

Speaker 1 you know, it would have been nice if live stream had been a thing when I was doing the MIT challenge. But

Speaker 1 I think the major problem of that is that the

Speaker 1 It's very difficult to parse what's happening there. Like a live stream for a speedrun could be like four minutes, so everyone could easily watch it and study it.

Speaker 1 Whereas if I've got like 400 hours of me doing a task, like it's kind of impossible for you to watch it and really easily learn from it.

Speaker 1 And so, I don't know, there's probably additional things that are necessary to make that broadly applicable. I think maybe just live streaming alone is not enough.

Speaker 1 And I think that's maybe why we haven't yet seen an explosion is that there's like one or two more innovations that we need to like lock that in. But

Speaker 1 I'm bullish on the fact that we don't really understand innovation at a sociological level.

Speaker 1 And I think that

Speaker 1 this is an area where if we had a better theory of innovation and a better theory of how we could do that culturally and socially,

Speaker 1 you know, rather than just like the typical way that I think it's proceeded where we're trying to explain how we've innovated up to this point, rather than like, well, what are the additional kind of social innovations that would themselves prime more innovations?

Speaker 1 I think there's lots of opportunities for technology that we haven't scratched yet.

Speaker 2 It's interesting how peer groups play into this.

Speaker 2 This podcast is named the Lunar Society after a group in England during the Industrial Revolution that was fantastically productive, that included Charles Darwin's grandfather, that included James Watt, that included a bunch of the important industrialists and scientists at the time.

Speaker 2 And it's an interesting question why these kinds of congregations of people that defined very productive cultures and time periods, like in Florence, like in England,

Speaker 2 why they haven't been congregating and happening across the internet where people are connected all the time, right?

Speaker 2 Like where is the where are the modern Michelangelos and the other artists meeting up today on the internet too?

Speaker 1 I don't know. So yeah, like like the whole reason of like why is,

Speaker 1 you know, and I've become persuaded by the thesis that progress and innovation have stalled in

Speaker 1 the world, that like, you know, the

Speaker 1 first half of the 20th century had more innovation than the second half. And I mean, we're only into the, you know, we're not even halfway through the first half of the 21st century.
But

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 one of the arguments that was given is that like, well, we see all all this innovation in computers, but in the first half of the 20th century or in the second half of the 19th century, there was huge innovations everywhere, like in every single aspect of life.

Speaker 1 And so, it's the fact that innovations have been confined to a single kind of

Speaker 1 industry. And I mean, even like startups and stuff, they're kind of, let's apply the internet business model to industry X has become kind of a motif.
So, it's hard to even say that

Speaker 1 Airbnb and Uber represent separate innovations, that they're both kind of like, what if we take the hotel industry and the taxicab industry and run them like they're software industries and it turns out that works?

Speaker 1 And like, so

Speaker 1 it's kind of hard to even sort of think about computation and stuff as being like how many of those are discrete innovations. And so I don't know.
I think that like,

Speaker 1 you know, there's some arguments that we have a different culture than we did before,

Speaker 1 that like there's been an increase in

Speaker 1 sort of barriers to innovation.

Speaker 1 It could be related to just low-hanging fruit. Like, you know, making advances in physics in Einstein's day could happen by a guy and a patent clerk.

Speaker 1 And now, well, theoretically, at least it's requiring, you know, to figure out that there's the Higgs boson required, you know,

Speaker 1 billions and billions of dollars at CERN to build like the largest machine on Earth to to like to just figure that out.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, we're a long way from when he figured out Brownian motion and just like kind of back the envelope, this is how big atoms are by just looking at like dust in a water glass.

Speaker 1 Like there may be the case that we've just

Speaker 1 found a lot of the easy innovations.

Speaker 1 Or it's possible that there is, you know, spaces that are unexplored, but we haven't found the kind of first frontier innovation there.

Speaker 1 So, you know, Alan Turing Turing writing the kind of first paper on the computer, I mean, this is opens up an entire explosion of fields for research and thinking and stuff, but it kind of hinges on someone sort of opening that crack and then you can have this kind of explosion of growth that kind of leads off of that idea.

Speaker 1 So I don't know. I don't know what the reason is why things have seemed to have slowed, but I definitely think that if we had a better understanding

Speaker 1 some of the principles of innovation and of like how it works sociologically. And I say this not necessarily being an expert even on that literature.

Speaker 1 I'm sure people will point out all the things that we have discovered on that. But I think that this is something that if we understood better, it could lead to

Speaker 1 more experimentations in how do we think about group structures, how do we think about networks, how do we think about prizes, incentives,

Speaker 1 cultures even of innovation that might lead us there. Because

Speaker 1 I definitely think this is not a zero-sum game. Innovation is the most positive-some game there is.
So, I think that, like,

Speaker 1 you know, if there was some part of the world that became a new Silicon Valley for something new, that would be very, very good for the world.

Speaker 1 And yet, you know, what are the things preventing that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, for the people listening, I recommend that you listen to my podcast with Jason Crawford about the roots of progress where he writes and also Caleb Watson.

Speaker 1 Jason Crawford as well. Yeah, he's a great guy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. I had him on the podcast a little while ago.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about

Speaker 2 Graham's new essay they just released yesterday called Early Work, where he talks about how the products of your,

Speaker 2 when you're starting off a project, are not going to look that impressive. And he gives various methods of just kind of getting over that hump and kind of ignoring how unimpressive it seems.

Speaker 1 What do you think of that? I mean, I think it's true. I've written about it before, perhaps less eloquently than Paul Graham or with less authority, probably, but I've written about this before.

Speaker 1 I think one of the things that, that, you know, and I feel this myself, is that

Speaker 1 there's this opportunity cost problem.

Speaker 1 And I think this might itself be one of the, like, we're talking about like, what are the things that deter innovation is that once you get good at something and it starts producing rewards, it's very difficult to kind of like climb down that gradient and do stuff that's like quite unrewarding.

Speaker 1 And so maybe this is also part of the problem. Like,

Speaker 1 we're talking about

Speaker 1 how do you perform, how do you do things?

Speaker 1 And the issue is that, like, when you're a kid, you're bad at everything, right? You're objectively, like, kids are objectively terrible at all things.

Speaker 1 And I say this, like, having a son, and so, like, apologies if he listens to this one day, but they are, like, they're not good at anything.

Speaker 1 But we praise them for doing stuff and for trying things and for exploring their talents.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think there's probably some developmental parts of it, but like, kids try and do lots of things, right?

Speaker 1 They like, it's normal as a kid to, you know, do art and to do every single kind of sport and to, you know, do all these things like we don't say oh yeah you're not good at this you better stop now right but as adults um we have this threshold for like okay well you need to be at least this good to even be doing this right yeah and so i think that prevents us from doing a lot of things.

Speaker 1 Some of that's probably wise. I mean, you know, if you spent all your life doing things that you're not as talented for, then maybe you won't spend time doing the things that are good.

Speaker 1 And I do think that there, you know, in a limited lifespan, there probably is a kind of exploration training phase, and then, like, all right, that was the best opportunity for you.

Speaker 1 Now you just work on it for 15 years to make your mark. I think there's probably some merit in that as well.

Speaker 1 Like, I think it was even Robin Hansen who kind of made the point that, like, you know, your 20s and maybe even your 30s are for like training, and then like your 40s and early 50s are like, make your mark, and then you're done, right?

Speaker 1 So, like, you kind of have to think about your career life cycle in that way. And, and even for me, I feel like I'm transitioning more into the exploit versus explore mode of my career.
That

Speaker 1 when I was 23 and I was doing the MIT challenge, I was really kind of, well, there's just this huge, vast terrain of areas I want to explore.

Speaker 1 I was just out of university, so I'm learning languages, I'm doing all sorts of different things.

Speaker 1 Whereas now I kind of feel like, oh, all right, these are the sort of my strengths and weaknesses and what I've done well. And so like, where can I really apply that to make an impact?

Speaker 1 So I do think that there is some benefit of that. But I do think that

Speaker 1 part of the challenge is just that,

Speaker 1 I don't know, I feel like people are just way too unambitious in general and not in like the ambition, like, I want to be better than other people, way, but they just don't think of big projects.

Speaker 1 They don't work on them. They don't, they don't have like, you know, big dreams to do cool things.

Speaker 1 Or if they are, it's usually just something like, I don't know, it usually boils down to something like social status.

Speaker 1 Like, I want to be the, you know, the person that does this that's better than other people. And I don't know.

Speaker 1 I feel like, I don't know how you change that, but I do think that rewarding kind of a culture where you want to do kind of ambitious, original things that are kind of interesting and you don't know where they're going to lead.

Speaker 1 I think that that's having that in you is kind of rare. And I think that cultivating it is probably good for yourself and society.

Speaker 2 You inadvertently answered my next question, which was what kind of advice would you give to a 20-year-old? And

Speaker 2 it sounded like you're talking about being more ambitious. Is there anything else you would say?

Speaker 1 What would I give? So people always ask me what I would give myself as advice for for a 20-year-old. And it's weird to say this.

Speaker 1 It sounds like really arrogant to say this, but when I go back, there's not actually a lot that I would change.

Speaker 1 And I think part of it is just that I actually have respect for my younger self because I think as you get older, you get more complacent and soft in ways.

Speaker 1 So there was things that I did where I was like, ah, I was really ballsy that I did that that I don't know whether I would have the guts to do now, which is a weird way of thinking about it because we often think in terms of like just strictly increasing capacities.

Speaker 1 But I think, you know,

Speaker 1 and I think doing things under uncertainty is different.

Speaker 1 Like, it's very easy to look back with hindsight, know something worked out, and be like, well, I wouldn't have worried so much about X, but like, maybe because you were worried about it, it actually happened.

Speaker 1 So I tend to avoid doing that. But

Speaker 1 if I were to be like, generally speaking, about what I would think about, my first thing would be that I think one of the tendencies I had when I was younger was like a stronger compulsion to like

Speaker 1 monetize isn't the right word, but like

Speaker 1 prove things would be successful, you know?

Speaker 1 And I think the MIT challenge and the year without English were a little bit of a like kind of a dip in that.

Speaker 1 And I think they only happened because I'd already kind of got my kind of blogging business and this sort of thing underway. But I think

Speaker 1 where I sort of recognize more is just that

Speaker 1 if you do have that kind of personality where you have some prospects for things, you're a little bit clever, you're willing to work on interesting, innovative projects.

Speaker 1 Just working on really interesting, innovative projects and like pouring your whole heart into them is probably what you should be doing.

Speaker 1 Whereas you see people like sub optimally trying to optimize for things like, you know, like, here's how I can make a little bit of money doing X when it's sort of like, no, no, no, you're working on like the coolest thing.

Speaker 1 And now you want to like find some way to like, you know, do something else. So I'll give an example.
Like I know someone who was planning on going into medicine.

Speaker 1 I mean, this isn't an innovation example.

Speaker 1 I was planning on going into medicine, very smart, but then gets a waitressing job and is like earning good tips, like earning for her at that time, good money.

Speaker 1 And so that's stealing away energy from studying. She doesn't go into medical school and that path closes.

Speaker 1 And to me, it's sort of like optimizing for waitressing salaries is totally the wrong thing to do at that point in your life, especially if you're bright and have some ambition.

Speaker 1 You should have totally been all in on the medicine path because it has way higher value in the long run.

Speaker 1 But I think it's one of those things that when you're 20 and you, you know, maybe your family's not super rich and you see yourself making a lot of money and you're like, I could have a house at 23 or something like this.

Speaker 1 It's very tempting to go down that route because you have this limited experience. And so.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 what I would kind of change maybe about my own perspective is that if you have some ability and you have like, and you know this about yourself, if you're listening to this, you know that, you know, you're reasonably clever and you're hardworking, you're listening to podcasts like this, and you're not just like, okay, how do I, how do I get through the day?

Speaker 1 But I have some ideas and stuff.

Speaker 1 Then I would be trying to like, yeah, you need to earn enough money to like live because you can't always get in a situation where people will prop up your kind of ambitions or fantasies.

Speaker 1 And I do think it makes sense to do things that have some reward potential because

Speaker 1 if you do things that are just totally crazy and they have no basis in the real world, that also might be a waste of time. But I think

Speaker 1 prematurely trying to kind of, okay, this is what the opportunity is, and I'm going to like get the value right now out of it seems to me to be like a kind of something that super talented people

Speaker 1 do maybe mistakenly.

Speaker 2 That's very good advice.

Speaker 1 That if you could just like, no, no, no, just keep going down and doing kind of crazy, interesting kind of projects that build your skill and do this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And, like, because you're basically increasing the quality of problems you can work on in your 30s and 40s.

Speaker 1 And then, if you're working on really high-quality problems when you're, you know, 35 or 45, like that's where you want to be rather than I'm, you know, finding a way to make a little bit of money when I'm 22 or something.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's hard to do. It's, it's hard to do, especially if, you know, like I also didn't come.
It's not like my parents were super rich or something like this.

Speaker 1 Like I paid my way through university and I scraped all the money when I was doing the MIT challenge and stuff.

Speaker 1 But I think there is a difference between I'm paying the bills versus, ah, this is like an okay, immediate sort of making a bit of money opportunity or this is an okay, immediate, like, get me a bit of status opportunity.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to kind of run for that rather than investing in these longer term ambitions.

Speaker 2 When I ask for advice for 20-year-olds, I'm always doing it under the pretense of, I'm really asking for advice or me, right? But that was one of the

Speaker 1 advice for you then is like,

Speaker 1 you know work on stuff so that like

Speaker 1 no one i think it's true is that um and i think there's like kind of a bit of status anxiety that would like when you're young you're kind of like you want to prove yourself and like you want people to respect you and you want to like earn that kind of social credit right now because and i think it depends on your reference group like i think if you have a high quality reference group they will push you in those ambitious directions but um

Speaker 1 you know, and especially I feel like my background, like I didn't, like I grew up in a small town and like small towns are kind of notorious for like, it's like ambitious people leave small towns.

Speaker 1 There was very, very much a kind of like the crab pulling the other crabs down out of the pot kind of situation I felt like in high school.

Speaker 1 And then I went to a sort of middling university where again, there was like, you know, there weren't a lot of people around me who had that kind of perspective on things.

Speaker 1 And so when that is the sort of surrounding culture, I feel like there is more anxiety and pressure to like, I need to prove myself right away that I'm doing the right thing.

Speaker 1 And so maybe even the sort of way of doing it and maybe the value of schools like MIT and stuff is if you surround yourself with people at MIT, then you're kind of like the idea of, okay, I'm going to do some world-changing innovation and I need to build up the sort of knowledge and capital to reach that point feels more natural than it might be at some other university where it's like, well, why are you doing this?

Speaker 1 I'm making all this money doing this side gig right now and you should be more like me or something like that.

Speaker 2 Very good advice. I actually have a vivid example in my mind of how that's directly applicable to me.

Speaker 2 Final question. You said you now have a son.

Speaker 2 So the last chapter of your book is, it was very fascinating. It was my favorite chapter because it's like transitions to like a Malcolm Gladwell book.

Speaker 2 And I want to ask, so I'll let you explain the example of Judith. Oh, I forget the last name.

Speaker 1 You did have Judith Polgar.

Speaker 2 Yes. Have you been utilizing that, the example of her teaching for your son?

Speaker 1 You know, there's no way that I would do that.

Speaker 1 I think for me, the Polgar example, and I do have a little bit of regrets now because the Polgars are kind of like, it's a little bit overused as a story.

Speaker 1 It's a little bit like the reason I didn't put Einstein in the book wasn't because he wasn't a good example, because he's too well known.

Speaker 1 But the Polgars have been kind of like, you read books in this genre and they're in a lot of books right now. So I only really kind of realized that belatedly.
But I found it very interesting.

Speaker 1 I definitely thought that it was a kind of interesting experiment.

Speaker 1 So in the same way that nowadays, I don't really think that like the average person should try to do the MIT challenge, but it's kind of a like, this is something that could be done and use it as a kind of guidepost of things that are interesting there.

Speaker 1 And so for me, and maybe this is my own cultural biases, but

Speaker 1 I definitely don't have the kind of attitude toward parenting that like, I'm going to engineer my son to be like something.

Speaker 1 I think what I want to do is to give him access to experiences so that the kind of person he wants to become is sort of influenced at least

Speaker 1 by,

Speaker 1 you know, what kinds of things did I show him were possibilities.

Speaker 1 And so this is sort of the attitude I take with my readers and I take with my blogs that I don't like the kind of manipulative approach to here's how I twist and prod you into the thing.

Speaker 1 Rather, I always feel like the best way to do things is to set an example, give people resources, show them how it's done, and

Speaker 1 allow them to kind of become their own person. And that sometimes means making their own mistakes, too.
Like you think that they should do X and they're not doing this.

Speaker 1 So I'm giving kind of like my younger self advice, but when my son is, you know,

Speaker 1 in his young 20s, he may see things differently from me. And I'm certainly not going to be in a position to like, oh, no, no, no, you need to do this or that.

Speaker 1 But I think that the main kind of lesson in my mind of the kind of polka example was just

Speaker 1 how far you could go, like how far you could go in sort of

Speaker 1 changing someone's kind of like base nature and it's definitely a provocative experiment and i think certainly a counterweight to a lot of the ideas um that you get from psychology and certainly behavioral genetics that like most of us are are fixed and we have no changeable traits and like it's all like this this is just certainly definitely a um

Speaker 1 it kind of it seems like a counterexample it seems definitely like a hmm that's interesting you know that you just decided that you're going to have a chest prodigy and you had three. Like,

Speaker 1 it's definitely interesting. But I think, as an example, I feel like

Speaker 1 to me, the idea that we are authors of our own life is like super central to my value system that I would never want to rob my son of that feeling.

Speaker 1 That, you know, that whatever he chooses to do and excel and believe in life, that this is something that, you know,

Speaker 1 he is the agent of, as opposed to like, okay, I'm living my dad's life plan for me,

Speaker 1 chapter three, or something like that. So, that's my stance on it.
And I know people certainly differ, but that's how I think about it.

Speaker 2 Well, Scott Young, thank you so much for being on the podcast. This is the most fun podcast I've done, and certainly the most personally interesting and useful.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 It was a great pleasure to have you.

Speaker 1 You have a great guest list, so I'm very proud to have ranked so highly.

Speaker 2 Thank you.