YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Brown

lines on the record: 215
first: 2024-12-26
most recent: 2024-12-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So many different kinds of people. Yeah, I remember. There was one like seemingly very successful cowboy, but you know, cowboy, some driving some fancy truck in Wyoming and had a big herd of cattle and all the rest of it and was just asking me, actually somewhat unusually asking me what I do. And so at that time I was doing cosmology. So I sort of tried to explain to him and he just had no totally disconnecting with anything, just didn't understand a word I was saying all the way through. And eventually we landed on the fact that the stars in the sky are just like the sun only much further away. And this was a fact that in his life up to that stage, he just never encountered. And that was extremely gratifying because he...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I never had to deploy that. Typically, it's pretty like there's a moment of anxiety in the first minute. But then after a minute, it's clear that everybody's, and they're also, I mean, they're also anxious about you. And, you know, in many ways, you can tell that they're quite nervous about you. And then after a minute, it's clear that everybody's, if not sensible human being, that at least a safe human being and everything's super relaxed for the rest of the ride typically.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To say that you get in and you feel unsafe is to say that you're car sick because even serial killers don't want vomit in their car. So that's a good reason to get out. And then you just say, okay, I'll just stay here. That's another trick I've never had to deploy that”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's hard. If they say they're going to that city and you've written something more vague on your sign, then it's maybe easier to decline a ride. If you want to get out of the car, the classic and their...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't write your exact destination on your sign. Write the direction. In which you're going. The reason is maybe twofold. One, a lot of people, if they're heading towards that place, but not going to that place, will not stop because they think, oh, I'm not going to wherever it is, I better not. I'm not going there, so I won't pick you up, even though you'd very much appreciate a partial write there. The other reason is if you do want to decline a ride, it's certainly a lot easier to do so if the person says, oh, I'm going to that city. Right.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it used to be very common in the United States. It's still reasonably common in Europe. It used to be very common in the United States. And then there were some mass murderers who... Drove the popularity down by targeting hitchhikers. Maybe this is just pure cope. In my mind, you need to worry about that less because if you are a mass murderer, it's really a serial killer. It's not really a high expected value strategy to cruise around looking for hitchhikers since there's so few of them. But that just might be pure cope in my head. I've never refused a ride for safety grounds, but I would. I hope I would if necessary. Sometimes you would refuse a ride because somebody's only going a short distance and you're in a good hitchhiking spot. It's kind of bad karma to refuse a ride, but sometimes you should do that. Other tips.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically know, and I would almost consider it poor form to do so, but actually there was There was one lady who came to stay in New York later and she was going down to Haiti to sort of be a doctor there. She was a doctor. And so I stayed in contact with her a bit. But typically, it's just the nature of the interaction is that you have this sort of beautiful moment in time together and then that's it.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he'd had a father who had been in the military, but he'd kind of had a difficult relationship with and ended up going and visiting his father's grave in Baron Rouge, never having done that in the 20 years since his father died, but just as this sort of turned, I mean, he just was driving along, expecting to go home and then just turned into the sort of spiritual quest for him. So, you know, stuff like that can be pretty gratifying. It's also sort of cheating. in my way of thinking about it meant to be taking people out of their way. They're meant to be going where they're going and you go with them and they take you no further. But in this case, I think he needed to go there. So that was good for him.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meant to only take us. I think it was just some state trooper had come along in South Carolina and was going to arrest us because it's illegal in some states to hitchhike and North Carolina. And so I was like, okay, just take the next ride. And it was just 10 miles down the road. And he ended up getting sort of so into it that we ended up driving maybe a thousand miles out of his way by the time we'd gone. And he'd had this, you know, we're having great conversations, just absolutely sort of wonderful time and he just wanted...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often it's just single people picking you up, and they'll say, I've never said this before to anyone else in my life. And they'll tell you some story of their life. And I do think it's obviously I'm very grateful to them for driving me down the road. But I think also it's an exchange and they're also getting quite a lot out of the conversation. I remember one case going to New Orleans, somebody just”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tend to have listened to a huge number of audiobooks. They have an enormous amount of information stored in their brain. Nobody to tell it to. Also, Many of them tend to have had Unlucky romancers at some stage in their past that they've never really got over or spoken to. And I really feel as though many of them would do well to speak to a therapist, but you are the therapist in that case. So, you know, in many ways people will tell you things that frequently people will say things like, I've never told anybody else. This is in my life before that's common not just the truckers, other people as well. I mean, sometimes it's families picking you up, and so they're not going to say that, but often it's just...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those guys interesting. Yeah, they're all cheating their logs. They have certain logs about how long they can travel for. At least every single one who's ever picked me up, maybe it's correlated with their willingness to pick up hitchhikers has all been in some way or another gaming the system of their logs about how long they're allowed to drive for and playing games with time zones and stuff like that. And they typically, yeah, they're smart people and they just have a lot to say and don't really have anybody to say it to. So they're very grateful.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all sorts of facts. A lot of people just like to talk. This is a lot of people out there, and I like to talk too. So it's mutually beneficial.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have definitely felt more unsafe picking up hitchhikers. Than I have hitchhiking. Maybe I just got lucky. But picking up hitchhikers, there it tends to be, you know, no one really picks up hitchhikers anymore. And there's definitely a selection effect on who's hitchhiking. I have definitely felt more in risk of my life with hitchhikers I've picked up than I ever did hitchhiking. But, you know, it's possible I just got lucky. You don't see the other branches of the wave function.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None of these people typically realize that your academic background never really comes up in conversation typically. I mean, sometimes it does, but typically that's not the nature of the conversation.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you see such a cross section of people who I might never otherwise meet and such a sort of high variance cross-section. Everything from idle millionaires cruising around the country looking for adventure to people who just go out of prison. in one memorable incident, well, it eventually transpired as we were going along that they were actually just teenagers and they somehow didn't clock that when getting in the car and they had stolen the family car and were driving west without a plan. And there I gave them a talk talking to and bought them dinner and some life advice. So that was some far stuff we got.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't take in terms of intensity, it doesn't really take that much wall clock time, as we say. Coast to coast Like a week or so, it's pretty fast because you're self driving in that sense, it's easier. You have to wait. And there is definitely high variance. How long you can be, but in terms of sort of incidence per minute, it's a pretty good way to see the world.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would probably be one time in Richmond, Virginia, in some not particularly good neighborhood trying to hitch out of there. I think that was about a day, which is really bad. That's really bad. Like sometimes if you get a good spot, that's worth a thousand miles. Just don't give it up just for a short hop anywhere. If you get a bad spot, get out of there on any means necessary because there's probably a thousand X variants and how high quality hitchhiking spots are, I would say.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we talk through that and work through that. And I felt in some ways I'd been his guardian angel, but he'd also been my guardian angel and pick me up in the middle of the desert. So there was some great exchange there.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I kind of waited until we got close and said. Is it possible that? Your fianc ⁇ is being scammed by these people and raise the notion of scamming. And he was willing to intellectually entertain the possibility. And then we got a bit closer. Is it possible that you are yourself being scammed by your fianc ⁇ e? And then he was like, no, no, it can't be. And he had all these documents to show that it was all legit. And they were just sort of somebody from a British legal background transparent forgeries. And I mean, he did eventually accept it and was just crying on my shoulder in some truck stop. It was quite a high pathos moment and then said this happened before and it turned out he previously been scammed in the same way or a similar way through somebody he'd met through the same match dot com profile that was his lucky profile because people kept messaging him through it”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On him, and the whole thing was some ginormous, and he was being scammed by his fianc ⁇ e. And very unfortunately for them, they tried to execute the scam while he had me in the cab and he never had anyone in his cab. So now he had me in his cab and they were trying to do some fraud on him. And I was able to, they had some wheat factory in Wales, United Kingdom, that they had some British High Court document saying that he was entitled to if he paid off the Lien on it. There was some long, complicated story that was sort of totally flagrantly false. And I kind of felt like I had a moral obligation to him to break the news to him. On the other hand, we were in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, and it was clearly a very important part of his personality that this was so.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that have been on their mind. So I'd say that those are often the really interesting ones. As I said, there's this one in Utah who was just talked from the moment I got into the cab until we got to Nevada. And I kind of got the feeling that he had sort of excess mental capacity and that this was his, you know, he was now just going to dump it on me. He was telling me all about his life. And I remember this very well, how his brother-in-law thought he was a loser, his sister.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, huge. I mean, it's just absolutely fire hose of wild things happening. Tell so many stories, like I remember once there was a trucker who picked me up in the desert outside Salt Lake City and who drove me to Battle Station, Nevada, and who as we were talking the truckers are always in fact the most interesting of all. It's typically illegal or in any way in violation of their employment contract for them to pick people up. So those guys are really, and it's always guys are really pushing the envelope in terms of picking you up. The truckers often will say you're the first person I've had in my cab in 20 years of trucking or something, and then they tell you about 20 years worth of...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some people are just totally normal Families moving their trial to college and you get there and you help them move some stuff into the dorm room just to thank you all the way through to absolutely wild cases, probably 20%. Just like this is one of the craziest things that ever happened in one way or another.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I enjoy meeting people and I enjoy the experience of meeting people. Episodic sense of which just you never know what's going to happen. I think I have a very high tolerance for ambiguity and I enjoy that.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many other people are evaluating you and just trying to decide what you're in for. Some people are lonely and want somebody to talk to. Some people have a just a spirit of adventure and find it exciting to pick people up. Certainly it's not a representative cross-section of people, I would say. There's definitely a selection bias in who picks you up. They tend to be more open and more risk tolerant.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's different for different people. I think about 20% of people will just always pick up hitchhikers no matter what. Even if I'd. Was dressed very differently and presented very different. I think some people would just pick people up no matter what. I basically fall into that category now that I was hard-coded into my brain that I will 100% pick up hitchhikers always under all circumstances just because enough people have generously picked me up down the years that I just feel as though it's my duty and sort of not subject to a cost-benefit analysis, just it's in there.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. So I hitchhiked a bunch around America and Europe. I've done Oxford to Morocco when I moved from... I hitchhiked a bunch of other times down to New Orleans, various other places. I think probably the biggest tip for hitchhiking is to stand in a good place. Some counterparty modelling. Imagine the person who's picking you up. They need time to see you, to evaluate you, and to decide they're going to pick you up, and then to safely stop, and that all needs to happen. So stand somewhere where people can see you, possibly at a stoplight, and where there's a place for them to safely pull over.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That also isn't true. Well, that's a great question. I mean, there's been a lot of debate in the black hole context about whether information is conserved by black holes, but the modern consensus is that it is.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not in principle. So something happened to the universe in its evolution, which is that The very early universe, just after the Big Bang, was opaque to light. We can only see light past about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Before that, everything's so dense. It's like just a dense plasma that light just gets absorbed by. It's like trying to look through the sun. And so we cannot see directly anything from before 300,000 years. Nevertheless, we can infer lots of stuff that happened from before 300,000 years. In fact, looking at that light, what's called the cosmic microwave background that was emitted at that time, we infer lots of stuff about just due to the patterns of anisotropies that we see in the sky, we can infer a great deal about what was happening earlier. And most of our confidence about modern cosmology comes from a number of experiments that starting the 80s but accelerating in the 2000s really very carefully measured that anisotropy and allowed us to infer stuff before that. At the information theoretic level,”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we look at outer in the universe, it's expanding. If you sort of play the tape back. And so that's a very big particle collider indeed. And so by just examining very closely the Big Bang and its aftermath, we're able to hopefully probe some of these quantities that are very difficult to probe. With particle platers. The disadvantage is that you can't keep running it and adjust the parameters as you see fit. It's just like one thing that happened once and now we're having to peer backwards with our telescopes to see what happened. But it can give us hints about things that would be inaccessible with any future flight.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it gives you hints. You're just examining the night sky very closely and seeing hints of what happened at the Big Bang. So yeah, this is a sort of different approach to doing high energy physics, which is Why do you want to build a big collider? You want to build a big collider because the bigger the collider, the more high energy you can smash things together with. And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that high energy means short resolution. You can see things on very small scales. That's great, except the cost to build them. There's some scaling laws and the scaling laws are not particularly friendly. There is another. Approach that one might say, which is, you know, there was a ginormous explosion that happened, which was the Big Bang. If you imagine...”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say we should definitely build another one if it was cheap to do so. And we should build another one once AGI has made us all so rich that it's cheap to do so. But it's not the obvious place to spend $50 billion if you had $50 billion to spend on science. Often it's these smaller experiments that are... Can be look for things in unexpected places. A decade ago, there was Bicep, which is a reasonably cheap tens of millions of dollars experiment at the South Pole that thought it had seen some hints in the cosmic microwave background of gravitational waves. That would have been revolutionary if true, not worth doing bicep if it cost $10 billion, definitely worth doing bicep if it costs $10 million. So there's all sorts of experiments like that, often observational.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they got so expensive that it's difficult to persuade people to buy a new one for us that's even bigger. It's a very natural thing to do to build an Atom smasher that just smashes things together to higher energy. It's a very natural thing to see what comes out. People were perhaps somewhat disappointed with the output of the LHC where it made the Higgs, which was great, and we found it, but we also expected it to be there. And it didn't make anything else, any of these more fanciful scenarios or anything basically unexpected, but people had speculated we see supersymmetry there or we see extra dimensions. And basically that was a null result. We didn't see anything like that.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. I mean, it's super interesting how everybody talks about how academics can't possibly compete with the big labs. But the cost of CERN is... Larger than the cost of big model training runs by lot. So that's just academics pooling their money. So that's an interesting fact.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a problem with particle colliders is in some sense that they got too expensive. And CERN is tens of billions of dollars, a small number of tens of billions of dollars to run this thing.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes beyond that. But basically, we won, and that makes it difficult to immediately, if you get too good, then it's hard to know where to push from there. That's as far as particle physics is concerned.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you take particle physics, I think it's because we were a victim of our own success that we wrote down theories in the 1970s, and those theories were called standard model, and those theories were Too good in the sense that we won, in the sense that we could predict everything that would come out of a particle accelerator and every particle accelerator that's ever been built and every particle accelerator that's likely to be built given our current budgetary constraints. So particle physics, I mean, there were some questions around the edges, but this model that we wrote down in the 70s and into the 80s basically Completely cleaned up that field. We wish to build bigger, more powerful particle accelerators to find stuff that”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think new ways to think about things have always been extremely powerful. Sometimes their fundamental breakthroughs, sometimes they are breakthroughs in which you even take regular physics. This is a story to do with renormalization that maybe is a little too technical to get into, but there was an amazing understanding in the 1970s about the nature of theories that have been around for forever or for years at that stage that allowed us to sort of better understand and conceptualize them. So I think there's good reason to think that there's still room for new ideas and completely new ways of understanding the universe.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A taste of things to come. I don't think there's reason, I don't think we should be pessimistic about that. I think there could easily be room for a completely new conceptualizations that change things. I don't think it's just turning the crank going forward.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direction to be exploring, eventually you hope that this gets grounded in experiment and various other things, but the distance between starting the research program and the community reaching consensus based on data and other considerations can be a long time. So yeah, we definitely don't have a good verifier in physics.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we've sort of solved it. I mean, we haven't solved it in the same way that, you know, if you have some new sort algorithm that you claim as fast than everybody else's sort algorithm, there doesn't need to be any dispute about that. You can just run it and see if physics is not the same way. It is definitely the case that there's a number of people who think they have great theories. There are even perfectly respectable people who are professors at prestigious universities who have very different opinions about what is and isn't a worthwhile”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Properly understand the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. So it wasn't, why does one theory replace another? One reason is obviously that it's more consistent with the data, but that's by no means the only theory. And if you just optimize for being consistent with the data, you're going to end up with... If you optimize only for being consistent with the data, you're going to end up with epicycles. You're not going to end up with some beautiful new conceptual thing. Part of the reason people like these new theories is that even though there may be not better at matching the data, they are more beautiful and we'd have to teach, and that's been a reliable guide in the history of science, and we'd have to teach these elements.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think maybe this is a philosophical difference where you maybe think that the way that a theory is good is that it best matches the best predicts the data with some loss minimization. That's not always how new theories, particularly revolutionary theories, come up. There's this famous fact even when they were moving from a Geocentric worldview to a heliocentric worldview that it was so beautiful, the theory by the time they were finished with the epicycles, I mean, not beautiful. It was so ornate by the time where these planets were moving around the sun, but moving on epicycles, that actually the data didn't any better fit the heliocentric worldview than the geocentric worldview, especially since they didn't”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is an experimental way that you could detect time dilation, but that would involve sending out. Or doing something in the real world, whereas I thought you were just trying to run this in a database.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think that. Could be productive. One challenge in that would be how do you evaluate whether you had a good theory at the end. That's going to be the tricky bit Things that are most easily paralyzed are things in which if you get the right answer, it's clear you got the right answer. Perhaps things in NP, one might say. Whereas in this case, is special relativity, how would your computer know if it generated special relativity that it was onto a winner? There are various ways in which it could know. It could check that it was mathematically self-consistent and various other facts. But the evaluation is going to be a tricky part of this pipeline that you might wish to set up.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can come up with all sorts of reasons in advance why that might not be something that will work, but you could also come up with reasons in advance why large language models wouldn't work, and they do. So I'm very curious to see what happens. I mean, the dream there would be that there's lots of things hidden in the data that no human would ever be able to tease out. And by doing this, you could just revolutionize the amount of these astronomical observatories are incredibly expensive. If we can just have a computer better parse all of the data from them in a way that no human ever come could, that would be a tremendous improvement. These things are very good at finding patterns, and maybe they'll find patterns that are not particularly interesting to a human.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. People are trying that. There's an effort, Shirley Ho and Flatiron, which is basically that exact plan, is they take the pipeline of all of the data that comes out of these astronomical observatories. They big and plug them into a transformer and see what happens.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, you see positive transfer between domains. So if you make them better at one thing, they become better at. Another thing across all domains. It is possible to make a model that is really, really, really good at one very particular thing that you care about. And then at some stage, there is some Pareto frontier and you start degrading performance on other metrics. But generally speaking, there's positive transfer between abilities across all domain”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recently as a couple of years ago, certainly three years ago, you just scrape from the internet any number of problems that are standard, totally standard high school maths problems that they couldn't do. And now we need to hire PhDs in whatever field and they come up with one great problem a day or something. The difficulty, as these LLMs have got stronger, the difficulty of evaluating their performance has increased.”
2024-12-26 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source