YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Matuschak

lines on the record: 158
first: 2023-07-12
most recent: 2023-07-12
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

“There's edges at the market, right? Where you need early adopters to kind of try things that have rough edges, and the early adopters sometimes they get cut and they bleed a little bit. And so that's why people aren't rushing into it as to why space repetition isn't widely used, for instance, to learn quantum physics, I think it's basically correctly priced. I can use space repetition to learn quantum physics a bit faster. It doesn't make it a fait accompli or anything like that. It's not like learning anatomy where basically if you study the deck, you'll be done. You need some more stuff and I'm working on some of that stuff. And also you need an incredible amount of very unusual knowledge that's largely tacit at the moment in order to use it in that way. That's part of what motivated recording this other video is to kind of show some of that in action. So the fact that the market isn't acting on this thing that it kind of can't really act on seems pretty appropriate.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Likewise, among language learners, space repetition in various forms is extremely common. Duolingo has space repetition integrated into it, and space repetition is kind of naturally present in the process of immersion learning. In fact, modern space repetition tools between the Leitner box and Wozniak supermemo, they were both originally motivated by language learning. So in language learning, there's a substantial market for space repetition. It could probably be used in a variety of more creative ways. For instance, Russell Simmons has pointed out to me that studying individual vocabulary words on flashcards often misses kind of integrative opportunities, which you really want is to kind of study lots of sentences or something like that, or possibly to build up towards that. Dualingo does something kind of like that, and people in space repetition for language learning subreddits mostly don't. Some of them do. It's kind of complicated.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's probably mostly efficient. So in places where space repetition as it stands without substantial novel cultural knowledge that's difficult to transmit and isolate, where all of that is valuable, we see a lot of space repetition usage. So among medical students who are highly motivated have lots of reason to study and the material is shaped in a way that's highly amenable to space repetition usage. There's tons of space repetition usage. In fact, the med student Anki subreddit is bigger than the Anki subreddit.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be, I don't remember exactly the breakdown, you know, call it 5% of things that you're responsible for that you have your hands on at all times and you are like directly manipulating, controlling. And then there's a ring outside of that that's a little bit bigger. Those are the things that you're keeping an eye on, right? So they are salient to you. You're getting reports on them. You are checking in on them. You are thinking about them. You're coming up with ideas and sending them down the chain, but you're not directly controlling them. And then there's a bunch of stuff that you've figured out how to delegate and you want to hear if there's problems. And they talk about how that structures evolved over time. It's been now eight years since I've been at Apple, and so I'm sure it's practically unrecognizable to me.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have how many platforms do they have? You know, iOS, iPad OS, Watch OS, Vision OS, Mac OS. Also, there's like an operating system running in a bunch of the cables on little chips in the cables, right? And all of that is under Craig. What does that mean? In practice, what it means is there is a set of software concerns that he's actually super concerned with and he's thinking about day to day. Like when I was at Apple, I had Craig Federigi in my office talking about gesture recognizer heuristics with me because that was something that was hypersalient to him. At the same time, he was basically completely ignoring 95% of software-related decisions. And he just fully delegated those things to others. There's a really interesting Harvard business review piece from a few years back about Apple's management structure and about how they have a couple of different concentric rings of kinds of responsibility for any given leader.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me first just respond to this observation about the enormity of the company, and then maybe we'll talk about the other firms. I think the reason Apple is able to do this is because of the way that they delegate. So while there is a very strong command and control structure and for important decisions that they really are made by a small group of people at the top, the individual leaders in the various areas at all levels of the hierarchy have an enormous amount of latitude. And that's the only way that any of this can work. So individual people are given very, very strong responsibility and authority within domains to make decisions. And that's how you can have all of these disparate products like Craig Federigi is head of software at Apple. What does that mean? How can you be head of software?”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More locally to the iOS team rather than at a top level executive team, the director of iOS apps might decide, like, we have this problem that because the apps were built at the same time as the system frameworks, we end up building our apps using this like weird Frankenstein, like partially internal framework, partially the public one that our developers use. And the internal one is always a little bit different and it's not always maintained reliably. And so we have all these problems about the skew between the two. So a big priority for us is going to be to rewrite all the pieces of our apps to only use the public bits and like, you know, so that they could be distributed on the App Store. And that's kind of like a more local decision.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not exactly. It's a little more push and pull, so a given team. Usually, some of their priorities will be internally determined, like the thermals team has its hobby horses and it knows what it thinks is important. And some of them will be externally determined. There is an executive team that makes ultimate decisions about like, you know, the main priorities for next year's devices or whatever. Like, ah, next year, we're going to do this face ID thing to unlock the phone.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Differential problem. It is iterative. So we'll run into stuff where, like, oh, there's a thing we really want to do, we can't pull it off because it drains power too much. Right. So, hey series, an interesting example to be able to activate a voice command at any time without interacting with the device is great. And people prototype that just like having a thing listening in the background and like watching for it. But that requires having the main CPU on all the time, like processing audio buffers. And you simply can't do that. It drains the battery. And so that attempt led to eventually having this dedicated coprocessor that runs at a lower power and it's very limited and restricted and it can be on when the main CPU is not on and it can listen for that sound.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that happen? I mean, one thing that's very interesting is that it's very compartmentalized and basically none of what you just said was relevant to me. Like it was all pre specified. So, the thing at Apple is you have a little domain that's like your own and the boundaries of that domain are determined by everybody's little domain. And so there's a person who's responsible for thermals. Actually, there's a team that's responsible for thermals. And they kind of figure out like, you know, okay, like how can I guess like what is our thermal budget? How much can we have the CPU on during what kinds of working situations? I basically can't argue with that. Like those are just my constraints.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it is a little bit of the thing about the mechanic hitting one thing and kind of knowing the thing, like, okay, I have design intuitions that led me in a particular direction. But there's lots of things I don't like about it. I just haven't allowed myself to spend any more time on it because I just don't think it's important enough.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I feel kind of bad about it because it's made its way into tons of commercial projects now, and people are like, oh, this is the way to present network notes. I think it's not very good in a variety of ways. I spent a couple days on it.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think, like, very interesting personal websites often come from people who are thinking about that question and kind of the shape of the thing that they want to put out into the world and making something that speaks to it. Often once you understand the shape, making the thing is not that effortful. My website was not an enormous project for me. It probably should have been a slightly larger one given that my income depends on people coming through it.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the right amount of effort? You know, I mean, there's no general answer to that question. Of course, that's going to be my answer, but what can I say about it? What's the job of the website? What's it trying to do? I think many, especially engineers, do themselves a disservice by fretting over their websites unnecessarily building vast technical infrastructure when really what they want is like a place to post the markdown files And they're better off just like getting a ghost installation and going too. I think the main thing to think about is like what is it that you want to put out in the world? What is the ideal form of that thing and to try to find some way of organizing and expressing that? We have these common patterns like a blog or a portfolio and often people end up kind of forcing themselves into these patterns. People will end up using blogging software to make something that's kind of durable.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like it. Oh This is what everybody says about their website, right? You know, it's three years old. That means I want to redesign it, but I will not allow myself because it feels like a distraction. Yeah.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's repeated. The thing that differentiates the kind of formal practice that I've been exploring, I think, is mostly it focuses on material that you wouldn't otherwise normally have repeated, either because you're too early with it to have a consistent practice or because it's just not firmly tethered enough in anything in your life.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think this is like this is embedded in our working world. So, for a researcher, when you need to write papers regularly and you're writing those background sections and you're repeatedly explaining the history of a particular line of research and citing the appropriate sources, that is a kind of space repetition. When you have students and you're mentoring them in conversation about like, oh, in this kind of situation, you really need to remember to do X. That is a kind of space repetition. And all of this stuff is kind of accidental. Doctors have grand rounds when even when they're not seeing patients regularly, they're still exposed to other patients and there's often a structure in this where the patient is being presented, you're supposed to be kind of trying to think like what would I think to ask? What would my differential before you hear it? There's like covert retrieval happening. So I think it's like it's everywhere in our world. And it's space.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're right. And like, usually, I don't want this stuff to go viral. Like, it's in Medias race. I think that the primary value that most of it has for people is kind of”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are better ways to do this. I think there were like design solutions. So for instance, if it were the case that my work was kind of mostly all in one place rather than in these separate places and the subset of the work that's public was kind of visually and structurally adjacent to the subset of the work that's private, it would be clear that there's this additional stuff that's available and perhaps you can see the first bit of it. Substack has this kind of stuff to get some sense of what it is that you'd be seeing. I've invested like zero effort into figuring out an appropriate presentation of this stuff.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I can't do it. I don't know how you think about this or if you think about subscriber only material for Lunar Society.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't quite understand this. I mean, I think it's also the case, like you'd probably have an easier time asking for subscriptions if you had a larger audience first. Can build the audience for free and then kind of have some bonus offering or something that's behind a wall. Maybe I feel very conflicted about this, actually. Maybe you can help me think about it. Well, I have all these patron essays. It's like most of my writing is these days because I'm kind of waiting until I can collect enough things for the next big public piece. I have a couple of like big public pieces in various stages of flight. So anyway, I mean, I'm writing a lot for patrons. And I think probably much of my audience or people out there don't even know that's there. So one challenge of member-only content is even making clear that it's there to others. And often people will try to achieve this by tweeting about or sending newsletters out about this subscriber-only content. And I just can't bring myself to do it. It feels terrible to say like, oh, here's a link, but you.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Member vibe, and my instinct is that if you were to move to become a member of Guern's lab kind of thing, he would have better results.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I hate asking people for it. I think this is a common issue for creative people. I hate it. I really hate it. I probably need to get over this. I do want to make one point, though. I had much more success with my Patreon when I recasted as like, oh, please support me. subscribe to support my work like the thing you were describing to something that I guess feels slightly more like, I don't know, an offering, like become a member. And like when you become a member, these things will happen. We're like these things are not terribly substantial necessarily, but I guess what I'm saying is like there's a difference between a tip jar and a membership in people's minds and like becoming a member means something and if you could offer something small that feels membership-ish, you might get very different results. And Guern has the kind of tip jar vibe. And I these days have kind of like...”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I expect he has plenty of traffic and plenty large audience. I think it's much larger than mine. I think it's more just like there are a bunch of variables about the way that you talk about this membership offering, and none of us really want to think about them. And I've ended up at a slightly more effective part of the space, but I'm pretty sure that there's much more effective ways to do whatever it is I'm doing.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grin is an interesting example because there's a simpler failure mode, and that's that I still routinely run into people who will tell me like, oh, I've really liked your work for a while. I didn't know you had a Patreon. And that's kind of a simple failure of a certain kind of marketing on my part. And I think Guern actually has this even worse. I adore Guern. I have learned so much from him. And it is the case you can go to his Patreon page and he actually makes public his revenue. He makes on Patreon a tiny fraction of what I do. I think this is inappropriate. Quern is a much more impactful researcher than I am. And he has a much bigger audience than I do. So the fact that they aren't converting into patrons, I think, is mostly a matter of the way that he talks about it and the way that he presents it. And it's not that he needs to market more people to his webpage.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like every paper is, in some sense, a little marketing piece trying to make the case that it's significant, that its results are really exciting or really important. And that is really corrosive to discovery. I mean, it's true that you need a really strong emotional connection. And part of that emotional connection comes from a sense of excitement of maybe being hot on the tail of something really good. But there's a temptation to kind of portray what you found in the best possible light and to kind of downplay its limitations and to take up space and to totalize. And all of this is just, I think it's just death for discovery.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very common to take any new marginal insight that is kind of above a particular bar and publish that as a little thing. And I just haven't done that. I've written little informal letters to my patrons like, hey, I figured this thing out this month. And if I were an academic, I probably would have published that as a paper. And if I were a marketing oriented, crowdfunded researcher, I probably would have done some glossy thing and promoted it and whatever. Like, look at this thing I figured out. But actually, I just don't think it's that big a deal and I'd rather get on to the next thing. I have that choice, I guess, of waiting to publish. But that's not really what I'm worried about. Really what I'm worried about is marketing, man, marketing. It makes it so hard to be honest with oneself, at least in my experience, not only to be honest, as I said, with what I think is interesting and what I think is important, but even to be honest about the results.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am really worried about the corrosive influence of audience and marketing on inquiry, honest inquiry. It is very easy, very, very easy to distort my work. It's almost a default to try to make it be something that people would be more likely to like rather than the thing that I actually want to investigate or to do the boring simple version of it rather than the interesting deep version so that I can publish more stuff more often. Like one thing that I've chosen not to do that is a choice that's definitely cost me financially is to publish what academics would call like minimum viable units of paper or something like that so that they have a pithier phrase than that. Minimum viable papers.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's worth considering that I'm also maybe not very good at this. I mean, so first off, I'm not that successful as a researcher. I guess I kind of object to the LeBron James characterization. It's true that I'm maybe the most successful crowdfunded researcher in tech stuff, and that's kind of weird. But the last couple of years, I've figured some stuff out, but I guess I wouldn't say I've had any spectacular hit kind of publication kind of things. One thing that is true of this is that, you know, when I have big publications, I get a lot of new subscribers. So I think there is some kind of market force that could be higher if I were spectacular success or whatever with my research. I think it's also true that I pretty systematically avoid marketing it. That's kind of a self-protection thing.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Projects that I've wanted to do require, say, hiring people, I have reached out to high net worth friends and they've helped, but in kind of below five figure or four-figure kind of range. And that's great. And I'm very grateful. So I guess the answer may be a mix. One of the big limitations to the crowdfunding thing is... It seems pretty clear to me it can't sustain a team or an institution or anything like that. It can barely sustain me. I earn somewhere between a grad student and a junior faculty member. And that's kind of okay, I guess. And there's a variety of reasons why that's okay for me that are pretty particular to my circumstance. But it certainly wouldn't be okay for everybody. And even for me, it doesn't allow me to support others”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to be honest, it's because it has worked. The history of the crowdfunding of this project is like many things in my life, the result of Goating from Michael Nielsen early on when we were working on this quantum country project, he suggested we set this up and I kind of hemmed in hawed and I said like, yeah, you know, it's going to be a distraction. We don't really need this right now. Let's deal with it later when we have something to show. And he's like, no, no, no, let's just get it started. It's going to be a long time to get enough subscribers and so on. And it turned out he was right. The process of crowdfunding a project is it takes maybe a couple of years at least in my experience to build up a subscriber base and starting earlier was better. And if that hadn't worked or if we hadn't started early, I think I probably would have just reached out and asked for individual help. And I probably will if it fails on me. I'll say also when there have been specific”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe there's a couple ways to interpret your question. One question is why crowdfund when I could appeal to high net worth individuals? And another version is like, why crowdfund at all as opposed to raising grants or talking to philanthropies or whatever? Are you mostly focused on the first of those?”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those wealthy individuals are very welcome to reach out and offer to do so. I will say I've been fortunate to have many high net worth individuals, sponsors, but I guess each of them is providing on my Patreon a sponsorship is $100 a month. So that is what I get from these people. I'm certainly not getting wild offers for more.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife is working on this study of biological markers of age in association with delirium and traumatic brain injury. And to do this, she is basically signing up patients who show up to the hospital, who have traumatic brain injury, and once they agree to participate in the study, taking various blood samples and things like that from them, and recruiting enough patients to get the significance that she requires will take like, you know, two years or something like this. She can report a little bit of intermediate stuff, but like certainly not a monthly update or something like that, right?”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I think my audience might not have as much disposable income. I have already made some progress. I think that's probably important, unfortunately. So it's probably very difficult to use crowdfunding in the very early days of a research project. I've already sort of chosen a research agenda or direction.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In summary, the thing that I've discovered that's kind of sad is that I end up having to think about this a little bit. And in particular, I realized that this project only even slightly works, the one that I'm doing, for crowdfunding, because it's understandable to others and it's interesting to others. And it's already in a place where there's some results that maybe look kind of promising or people are like, oh, more like that. But it's very easy to imagine other projects that are not broadly applicable. You know, if I were doing marine geology stuff, I probably wouldn't have a big crowd of internet people not nearly as large anyway were excited. So that's one property. This work is very general. It applies to many, many people. It applies to people who have disposable income. So if I were doing a research project on, I don't know, like writing practices of disadvantaged artists.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the maybe unfortunate things that I've learned in my crowdfunding experience is that there are some dynamics that seem hard to change. So one of them is at churn rate, you know, like any subscription kind of revenue business model, I guess that's what I have, you lose subscribers every month. In my case, it's about 2%. And it's not that large, but it does mean that I need a certain number of new subscribers all the time. And one thing I've learned that's kind of interesting is that the trend rate is surprisingly insensitive to anything that I do. I've experimented with a variety of things and it really hasn't meaningfully changed the turn rate. What does change things is getting more people into the top of the funnel? In other words, marketing. And there are some things that have maybe affected the fraction of those people in the top of the funnel who convert or whatever. I really hate this way of thinking about it.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portray Sense of personal empowerment and possibility. We maybe remember growing up and being locked in our bedrooms at midnight or whatever, like fooling around and we have this very powerful tool at our disposal and it's opening up these worlds for us. And I think for many people here, that was like a formative part of their personal development. And so anybody pointing that at and saying we can do more stuff like that is going to be pretty compelling, I think.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought we were like a thinky people, and people are very interested and engaged also with anything they can potentially expand our capacity there. And so that too is tantalizing. Like, what if I could think better? It's also tantalizing because it's meta. So there's all these cliches about people tinkering with their dot files endlessly or tinkering with their blog website, which has two posts on it, but they have to rewrite it because they want to do something else. And now the new one will have three posts on it before they rewrite it again. Tools for thought also scratch that itch. It's work about the work. This sounds very cynical, by the way. I don't mean for it to be. I'm just trying to earnestly answer the question. But, okay, here's a more optimistic and generous response. I think many of us got into computing because computers”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While it contains this message for technologists that they can potentially be very powerful, and that's always tantalizing for people, I guess, I think it also feels very actionable for people in a way that's actually super misleading. I mean, so I meet tons and tons of people who tell me that they're interested in tools for thought, and 95 plus percent of them are engineers. And the problem with this is that building an interesting tool for thought is basically entirely a design problem. And there are design ideas are usually not very good or are troubled in a variety of ways. And yet, they can make a thing. They can make a thing that solves a problem maybe for them in their lives. And that feels very tantalizing or encouraging. It feels like something they get their hands around, I think. I think we in Silicon Valley are very, very interested in”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I learned some things. It was fine. It taught me a lot about where that particular format succeeds and fails in other venues. It was just not a very effective way to find those things out. I built this very general, it was an MVP in the sense that it has very few features and it's very simple, but it was highly general. I mean, it's like, it's a deployed thing that has infrastructure, it has accounts, it has all this stuff that you do when you're building a real thing. And that's very different from like, well, let me work with this one author and like see if I can make it work with this one other book that's very different from quantum country to form like a specific question or specific theory about like, well, it worked for this text. Like, what's the next kind of text that would be good to test with? And then to do that, I could potentially do it. I certainly could have done it much more rapidly.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scalable thing for the world at this moment. I'm trying to build the idea. The prototype is an expression of the idea. And once it arrives at a good place, then maybe there can be some scalable solution. But it's not necessarily at that place. And until it's at that place, there's a lot of thinking and sketching that goes along with the building and prototyping. I think part of my confusion here is that often I still need to hear this advice. Like often I will just tie myself in knots in theory land and like what I really need to do is to have a friend sit me down and say like, is there a piece of this that you can carve off and build next week? And so you're hearing a lot of tension.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, very concretely. So Michael Nielsen and I made this quantum country thing when I was trying to think about what to do next. The most obvious or natural idea was like, well, what if we just tried that with lots of other things? And that idea occurred to me and the pandemic had just struck. So I was feeling a little timid, I guess, creatively or emotionally. I wanted something that felt kind of safe. And I knew that I could do that. Like, okay, I can build a platform that generalizes this thing that we did for this textbook. So I did. And I did it relatively quickly. I did it in a few months. And that wasn't the right thing to do. It wasn't really the right question to be asking. The idea wasn't that strong. It wasn't the right way to test it, like building this highly general version of it. I would have been better building more one-offs rather than a self-serve thing that anyone could use. And this comes down to the difference in aim. I'm not trying to build some kind of”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess what I'm saying in a very long winded and confused way is that I think it's difficult to have ideas by means of building an MVP very rapidly. Now, if you have an idea that you think is interesting, it is good to test it rapidly. And so part of why I'm confused is in my response here, is that it's good advice once you have something worth testing. It's just that For me, adopting that mindset, and I've lived in it.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That capture new ways of doing new kinds of objects that can be manipulated. In Photoshop, for instance, you can manipulate a photo by means of a construct called a layer. This is a very strange idea. It has some precedent in dark rooms where you could potentially have kind of like sheets of film. I don't mean like the negatives, sheets of gels that you could potentially put over the lights to affect the exposure and to make there be more exposure here and less there. But in Photoshop, they're non-destructive and they're continuously manipulatable. And the layer is a new primitive that is introduced into the activity of photo editing. And it utterly changed what you could do in photo editing.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing is a nonlinear process, but writing with a pen linearizes it, and many, many other observations like that and on the nature of what it means to have a thinking environment is how we got that particular interface. Likewise, the way that we got powerful programming environments, insofar as we have them Is by people thinking very hard about what it means to specify a system. And coming up with new primitives that express those ideas. I think the most powerful interfaces are often the expression of new ideas or new primitives.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is possible. And the theory of change is to look at the endpoint to try to work backwards. Now, the metaphors imperfect because in research you actually usually don't exactly know what the endpoint is. And you certainly don't know how to work backwards. But I guess what I'm saying is that following that advice historically often has led me to try things that were straightforward. I think the most powerful design work has ideas in it. What makes A nonlinear text editor that is like the text editors that we all know and love. So powerful is this observation that”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have complicated feelings about this. I need different advice on different days, and of course different people need different advice on different days. But when I was getting into this kind of work, that kind of advice led me to do, practically speaking, is to not think all that deeply about the ideas I was exploring and to look to basically like an idea would come up and I think like, oh, I can try that. And then I would try that. And then I'd learn something and then I'd repeat. And there wasn't this sense of building a theory of like what the problem is and what it would mean to solve it. Instead, it was just a theory of action. Like a theory of action is opposed to a theory of change is if you imagine like you're at some point, your current position and eventually you want to get to some coal state. A theory of action is you look around you and you say like, well, what can I do? What can I build? What do I see?”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's partially because past me is another person. It's kind of a cliche, you know, but like I am routinely looking at journal entries from a year ago. This is partially. You could view that as a failure of this netwriting system. Maybe in some ideal sense, I shouldn't be looking at these journal entries because if something's important and it's going to be something I refer to a year later, it should be in some durable evergreen note. I don't know. You don't always want to do that. It feels like prepping. Maybe there's an amount of prepping that's good. We live in California and maybe everybody should have an earthquake kit, right? Like maybe that's good. But maybe you don't need to hoard 300 cans of beans. So there's an amount of prepping that feels like a reasonable amount to do. There's an amount that feels kind of dutiful and unpleasant.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends, but usually actually. My journals are like complete sentences, complete paragraphs usually, sometimes bullets, sometimes kind of veering and breaking and changing to new subjects suddenly. But they tend to be filled with links to the things that I'm talking about, in part because I'm trying to accumulate context in those things.”
2023-07-12 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source