YouSaid · the spoken record

Cal Newport

lines on the record: 201
first: 2021-03-05
most recent: 2021-03-05
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

“No one would ever murder anyone if they were an evangelical Christian, right? So it's like what this is kind of a tangent that I'm on shaky ground here. It's something I've been interested off and on a lot.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the average person, though, this notion of live as if is kind of how religions work. Live as if this is true. It's like an OS for getting in alignment with because through cultural evolution, like you behave in this way, do these rituals live as if this is true gives you. The goal you're looking for. But that's a complicated thing. Live as if this is true because if you, especially if you're not a theologian to say, yeah, this is not true in an enlightenment sense, but I'm living as if it kind of takes the heat out of it. But of course, it's what people are doing because, you know, highly religious people still do bad things. Where if you really were absolutely a hell and I'm definitely going to go to it if I do this bad thing, you would never have”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Religion, but in this sort of more sophisticated. I mean, if you went back, yeah, I mean, it's the issue with like a lot of the recent critiques, I think, is it's a It's a straw man could critique in a complicated way, right? Because the whole way this works, I mean, the theologians, if you're reading Paul Tillik, if you're reading Heschel, if you're reading these people, they're thinking very sophisticatedly about religion in terms of this. It's an effable and we're just these things and it connects us to these things in a way that puts life alignment. We can't really explain what's going on because our brains can't handle it, right?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's evolution, I mean, this is Francis Collins' book also. He's like, well, That's a religious that could be a very religious notion. I think this stuff is interesting. I'm not a very religious person, but I'm thinking it's not a bad idea. Maybe what replaces, honestly, like maybe what replaces religion is a return to”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She focuses more on Jung and other people, but I mean, I know he's very Jungian, but that same type of analysis, I think, roughly speaking, like Armstrong is sort of a, it's kind of like a Petersonian analysis, but she's looking more at the deep history of religion. But yeah, he throws in the evolutionary. Yeah.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We grew these suspicions around religion that are very much of the modern era, right? So the Karen Armstrong, like Sam Harris's critique of religion, makes no sense, right? The critique's based on, well, this is you're making the ascent to propositions that you think are true for which you do not have evidence that they are true. That's an enlightenment thing, right? This is not the context, and the religion is the Rutherford model of the atom. Like it's not actually maybe what is underneath happening, but this model explains why your chemical equations work. And so this is like the way religion was. There's a God, we'll call it this. This is how it works. We do this ritual. We act in this way. It aligns with it, just like the model the Adam predicted why NA and CL is going to become salt. This predicts that you're going to feel and live in alignment, right? It's like this beautiful sophisticated theory, which actually matches how a lot of great theologians have thought about it. But then when you come forward in time, yeah, maybe it's evolution. I mean, this is like what Peterson hints at, right? Like he's basically...”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Armstrong lays out this good argument. And where it gets really interesting is that she emphasizes that all of this was considered ineffable. So the whole notion, and this is like rich in Jewish tradition in particular and also in Islamic tradition, we can't comprehend it understand what's going on here, right? And so the best we can do to approximate understanding of live and alignment is we act as if this is true, do these rituals, have these actions or whatever post-enlightenment, a lot of that got Once we learned about enlightenment,”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They wouldn't have called it that back then, or yeah, I mean, whether they said they didn't have that as pre-enlightenment. They just said, this is here. The directive is to try to live in alignment with that.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one thing we had were these different intimations of this feel like awe and mystical experience and this feels something you feel when you act in a certain way and don't act in this other way. And it was like the scientists who were trying to study and understand the model of the atom by just looking at experiments and trying to understand what's going on. The great religions of the world were basically figuring out how do we make sense of these intimations and live in alignment with them and build a life of meaning around that? What were the tools they were using? They were using ritual, they were using belief, they were using action. But all of it was like an OS. It was like a liturgical model of the atom”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's very interesting. She was a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion. But one of the smartest thinkers in terms of accessible theological thinking that's not tied to any particular religion. Her whole argument is that the way to understand religion, first of all, you have to go way back pre-Enlightenment where all this was formed. We got messed up thinking about religion post-Enlightenment, right? These were operating systems for making sense of intimations.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to give away too much, but just. Trust me, 27. So, I mean, I don't know, obviously, right? I mean, I'm a Yeah, I don't know. But going back to what you were saying about the sort of the existentialist or sort of the more nihilist style approach, the one thing that there is are intimations, right? So there's these intimations that humans have of somehow this feels right and this feels wrong. This feels good. This feels like aligned with something, you know, when I'm acting with courage to save whatever, right? It's not these intimations are a grounding against arbitrariness. Like one of the ideas I'm really interested in is that when you look at religion, right? So I'm interested in world religions. My grandfather was like a theologian that studied and wrote all these books. I'm very interested in this type of stuff. And there's this great book that it's not specific to a particular religion, but it's Karen Armstrong wrote this great book called The Case for God.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment, like fewer things give humans more resiliencies, like having done that, your relationships were strong, right? Many people coming to your funeral is a standard. Like a lot of people are going to come to your funeral. I mean, you matter to a lot of people. And then maybe having done to the extent of whatever capabilities you happen to be granted, you know, and they're different for different people and some people can sprint real fast and some people can do math problems, tried to actually do something of impact.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's his whole thing now, right? His second mountain rode the character. Both these books are, he has his whole premise of there's like this professional phase and there's a phase of giving of yourself and sacrificing on behalf of other people. I don't know. Maybe it's all mixed together, right? You want to, I think living by a code is important, right? I mean, this is something that's not emphasized enough. I always think of advice that my undergrad should be given that they're not given, especially at a place like Georgetown that has this like deep history of, you know, trying to promote human flourishing because of the Jesuit connection. There's such resiliency and pride that comes out of living well even when it's hard, like living according to a code, living accord to, which, you know, I think religion used to structure this for people. But in its absence, you need some sort of replacement. But this, even when things were at soldiers get this a lot, right? The experience is a lot. Even when things were tough, I was able to persist in living this way that I knew was right.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a good question to go backwards on. I mean, this is like David Brooks' eulogy virtues versus resume virtues. So his argument is that, and that's another interesting DC area person. I keep thinking of interesting DC area people. All right, David Brooks is here too. His argument, he thinks eulogy virtues is, so what we eulogize is different than what we promote on the resume.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's do what we can now so that when we really confront and think about it, we're more likely to feel better about it. So, in other words, like, let's focus now on living and doing things in such a way that we're proud of so that when it really comes time to confront that, we're more likely to say like, okay, I feel kind of good about the situation.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're neglecting the fundamental human drive, like we have this, we talk about the boredom instinct. We want to build things, we want to have impact, we want to do productivity. That's not nearly as clear-cut of a drive of we need people.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practicing interactions because it's so crucial to what we do. It's like at the core of human thriving. So more recently, the way I think about it is like relationships first. Okay, given that foundation of putting like, and I don't think we put nearly enough time into it, I worry that social media is reducing relationships, strong relationships. Strong relationships where you're sacrificing non-trivial time and attention resources, whatever, on behalf of other people. That's the net that is going to allow you to get through anything. Then, all right, now what do we want to do with the surplus that remains? May I want to build some fire, build some tools.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's all rewired to do it. It's like all of our brain is for this. Like everything, all of our mechanisms, everything is made to service social connections because it's what kept you alive. Your tribal connections is how you didn't starve during a famine. People would share food, et cetera. And so you can't neglect that. And it's like everything. And people feel it, right? Like there's no, our social networks are hooked up to the pain center. It's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone or like someone dies or something, right? That's like how seriously we take it. There's a pretty accepted theory that the default mode network, like a lot of what the default mode network is doing, so the sort of the default state our brain goes into when we're not doing something in particular is practicing sociality.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's the plan? Let's start figuring that out now because it's not all some people get off better than others, but eventually stuff happens, right? You get sick, something falls apart, the economy craters, someone you know dies, like all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen, right? So how are we going to do this? Like, how do we live life and life is hard? And in ways that is unfair and unpredictable, then relationships is the that's the buffer for all of that. We're wired for it, right? I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism. I went down this huge rabbit hole about the human brain and sociality.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think relationships is the whole deal. Like I thought about this the other day, I don't think context was. I was thinking about if I was going to give like an advice speech, like a commencement. Address or like giving advice to young people and like the big question I have for young people is if they haven't already bad things are going to happen that you don't control”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, I handed in this manuscript for the book that comes out now, like when I handed it in over the summer, like during the pandemic. So it's not terrible, right? And we were editing during the pandemic and I finished it in the spring.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I had a great editor when I was first moving into hardcover books, for example. It was my first big book advance and my first sort of big deal. And he was like a senior editor. And it was very useful. We had a lot of long talks, right? So this was my fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You was my first big hardcover idea book And we had a lot of talks like even before I started writing it just let's talk about books and his philosophy. He'd been in the business for a long time he was the head of the head of the imprint. It was useful.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right people. That's what I would say. I say there's definitely, and maybe it's just good fortune in terms of my agents and editors I've worked with, there's really good people who see the vision or smart or incredibly literary. Yeah.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money can be good, by the way, right? I mean, it's very power law type just distributed, right? So the money on a hardcover is somewhere between $1 to $2 a book.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas the first book I wrote when I was 21, I had notes such as you start a lot of sentences with so, you don't use any contractions because I've been doing scientific writing. We don't use contractions. You should probably use contractions. At least it was way more, you know, I had to go back and rewrite the whole thing. Yeah.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, all of it depends, right? So when it comes to the relationship with the editor on the writing, it depends on the editor and it depends on you. So like at this point, I'm on my seventh book and I write for a lot of major publications. And at this point, I have what I feel like is a voice that I've and a level of craft that I'm very comfortable with, right? So my editor is not going to be kind of going to trust me and it's going to be more big picture. I'm losing the thread here or this seems like it could be longer.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just as like, okay, I need copy editors and graphic book binders and I need a contract with the printer, but oh, the printer doesn't have slots. And so now I have to try to use, I mean, it's.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got a process. I mean, I know Jocko did this recently. He started his own imprint, and I have a couple other, but it's huge overhead. I mean, if you run a business and you, so like Jocko is a good case study, right? So he got fed up with Simon Schuster dragging their feet and said, I'm going to start my own imprint then. If you're not going to publish my kids' book. But he, what does he do? He runs businesses, right? So I think in his world, I already run, I'm a partner in whatever in origin and I have this and that. And so it's like, yeah, we can run businesses. That's what we know how to do. That's what I do. I run businesses. I have people. But for like you or I, we don't run businesses. It'd be terrible.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The book's been doing, anyways. Right. Yeah. If it's, I want to get directly to certain audiences or crowds. It might be harder through a traditional publisher, there's better ways to talk to those crowds. It could be on clubhouse with all these new technologies. Self-published book's not going to be the most effective way to find your way to a new crowd. But if the idea is like, I want to leave a dent in the world of ideas, then have a vulnerable old publisher, you know, put out your book in a nice hardcover and do the things they do. That goes a long way. And they do do a lot. I mean, it's very difficult, actually. There's so much involved in putting together a book.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because you have other, so like self-publishing the book, the goals that would solve, if you have much better ways of getting through those goals might be part of it, right? So if there's the financial aspect of, well, you get to keep more of it. I mean, the podcast is probably going to crush.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And well, and depends on your goal. So, you know, like I push you towards. Big publisher because I think your goal is it's huge ideas you want impact. Have more impact”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self publish it or do something like that, but putting that aside, there's a lot of people I encounter. Want to publish a book with a main publisher, but they invent their own rules for how that works”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, or if you create your own process for how it should work, the book's not going to get published. So there's the separate question, the economic question, like, should I create my own?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's much easier to get an agent than a book deal so the thought is if you can't get an agent then why would you so you start with and also I mean the way this works with a good agent is they know all the editors and they have lunch with the editors and they're always just okay what projects do you have coming what are you looking for here's one of my authors that's the way all these deals happen it's not you're not emailing a manuscript to a slush pile”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, and the agent's going to sell it to the publishers. So, like, you're never sending something directly to the publishers. And nonfiction, you're not writing the book first, right? You're going to get an advance from the publisher once sold. And then you're going to do the primary write in the book. In fact, it will, in most circumstances, hurt you if you've already written.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I usually advise is follow the process as is. Don't try to reinvent. I think that happens a lot where You'll try to reinvent the way the publishing industry should work, like this is kind of not like in a business model ways, but just like this is what I want to do. I want to write a thousand words a day and I want to do this and they're going to put on the internet. And the publishing industry is very specific about how it works. And so when I got started writing books, which at a very young age, so I sold my first book at the age of 21, the way I did that is I found the family friend that was an agent. And I said, I'm not trying to make you be my agent. Just explain to me how this works. Not just how the world works, but give me the hard truth about how would a 21-year-old under what conditions could a 21-year-old sell a book and what would that look like? And she just explained it to me. Well, you'd have to do this and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write and you would have to do this type of writing for the publications to validate it and blah, blah, blah. And you have to get the agent first. And I learned the whole game plan. And then I executed. And so the rough game plan is with nonfiction. You get the agent.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that'll be my next book. That'd be ambitious, the fundamental core of reality comma, and some advice for being more productive at work.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's the whole Newton to Einstein, right? So you can say this must be right because it's so predictive. Well, it's not quite predictive because Mercury wobbles a little bit. I think we have it set and then you turn out Einstein and then you get Bohr like, no, not Einstein. It's actually statistical. And yeah, so that would take a”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Abstract math is sort of like unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things. And that's just what I feel like I glimpse. I'm not like a super well-known theoretician. I don't have really famous results. So even as a sort of middling, you know, career theoretician, I keep encountering this where we think we're solving some problem about computers and algorithms. And it's some much deeper underlying math. It's Shannon. But Shannon is entropy, but entropy was really goes all the way back to whatever it was, Boyle, or all the way back to looking at the early physics. And it's, to me, I think it's amazing.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that algorithms can be very explanatory, right? Like if you're trying to explain parsimoniously something about an ant colony or something like this, you're not going to, ultimately it's not going to be explained as an equation, like a physics equation. It's going to be explained by an algorithm. So this algorithm run distributedly is going to explain the behavior. So that's mathematical but not quite mathematical. But it is if you think about an algorithm like a lambda calculus, which brings you back to the world of mathematics. I'm thinking out loud here, but basically.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason I hesitated, because it's something I taught this seminar and did a little work on what are called biological algorithms. So there's this notion of So physicists used mathematics to explain to the universe, right? And it was unreasonable that mathematics worked so well. You know, all these differential equations, why does that explain all we need to know about thermodynamics and gravity and all these type of things? Well, there's this movement within the intersection of computer science and biology. This kind of wolf ramium, I guess, really.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's the question, right? That's the physicist's question. I mean, I'm probably in the discovered camp, but I don't do theoretical physics. So I know they have a. They feel like they have a stronger claim to answering that question. It comes back to it. Everything comes back to it. I mean, all of physics, the fact that the universe is, well, okay. It's a complicated question”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to realize there's some sort of other representation of what's going on with these Turing machines trying to sort of efficiently There will be an existing mathematical result that applies”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improved a lot of them and simplified a lot. You could put it all in one paper. It's like, are we really? And then, okay, so this new paper that I submitted a couple weeks ago, I found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs for this contention resolution problem. You could reprove them using Shannon source code theorem. That actually when you're breaking contention, what you're really doing is building a code over, you know, if you have a distribution on the network sizes, it's a code over that source. And if you plug in a high entropy information source and plug in from 1948, the source code theorem that says on a noiseless channel you can't send things at a faster rate than the entropy allows the exact same lower bounds fall back out again, right? So like this type of thing happens. There's some famous lower bounds in distributed algorithms that turned out to all be algebraic topology underneath the covers and they won the Girdle Prize for working on that. So my sense is what's going to happen is at some point someone really smart will be very exciting.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This happens to me a lot, not a lot, but it's happened to me a few times in my work where we obfuscate it because we say, well, there's an algorithm and has this much memory and they're connected on a network. And okay, here's our setup and now we're trying to see how fast it can solve a problem. And people do bounds about it. And then the end, it turns out that we were just obfuscating some underlying mathematical thing that already existed. Right. So this has happened to me. I had this paper I was quite fond of a while ago. It was looking at this problem called contention resolution where you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel and they're trying to break symmetry. So it's like an Ethernet whatever. Only one person can use it at a time. You try to break symmetry. There's all these bounds people have proven over the years about how long it takes to do this, right? And like I discovered at some point there's this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s. All of these lower bound proofs all come from this. In fact, I didn't.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be true. I mean, I'm not a complexity theorist, but every complexity theorist I know is convinced they're not equal and are basically not working on anymore. I mean, there is a million dollars at stake if you can solve the proof. It's one of the millennium prizes. Okay, so here's how I think the P not equals MP proof is going to eventually happen. I think it's going to fall out and it's going to be not super simple, but not as hard as people think because my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science based on just some results I've done. So this is a huge extrapolation is that a lot of what we're doing is just obfuscating deeper mathematics.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a way that in 1995 is probably not the way public health officials would be thinking. Now it's like, well, this is, if we said this about mass, but the other team said that about masks. We can't give an inch. So we got to be careful and like we can't tell people it's okay after they're vaccinated because that might we're giving them an inch on this. And that's very twittery in my mind, right? That is the impact of Twitter on the way we think about this course, which is a dunking culture of don't give any inch to the other team and it's all about slam dunks where you're completely right and they're completely wrong. It's as a rhetorical strategy. It's incredibly simplistic, but it's also the way that we think right now about... We do debate, it combined terribly with election year pandemic”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades of public health knowledge, a lot of which was honed during the HIV epidemic, was thrown out the window because a lot of this was happening on Twitter. And suddenly we had public health officials using a don't give an inch to the other team mindset of like, well, if we say this, that might validate something that was wrong over here. And if we say this, then maybe that'll stop them from doing this. That's very twittery.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I live in a school district right now in Montgomery County that's a billion dollar a year budget, 150,000 kid school district. It just can't, it's closed, you know, because it's too. So I'm interested in that counterfactual. Yes, you have all this information moving around. And then you have the effects on discourse that we were talking about earlier that the Neil Postman style effects of Twitter, which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset of Don't give an inch to the other team. And we're used to this and was fired up by politics and the unique attributes of Twitter. Now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly we see”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, I think that's a really interesting case study. I'm interested in the counterfactual of 1995. Like, do the same virus in 1995. So first of all, it would have been... Get to hear whatever the nightly news we'll talk about it and then there'll be my local health board will talk about it. That mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be very sort of localized. Okay, our community is trying to figure out what are we going to do, what's going to happen. We see this with schools. Like where I grew up in New Jersey, there's very localized school districts. So even though they had sort of really bad viral numbers there, my school I grew up in has been open since the fall because it's very localized. It's like these teachers and these parents, what do we want to do? What are we comfortable with?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source