YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Isbell

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192
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2020-11-02
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2020-11-02
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  1. “I mean, it certainly helps, but there's a trade-off, right? You have to be diluted enough to think that you can succeed. I mean, you can't get a PhD unless you're crazy enough to think you can invent something that no one else has come up with. I mean, that kind of massive delusion is that. So you have to be deluded enough to believe that you can succeed despite whatever odds you see in front of you. But you can't be so deluded that you don't think that you need to step out of the way of the oncoming train.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Against any of that, and furthermore, I felt as if there was enough of a critical mass across the institute from students and probably faculty though I didn't know them who wanted to make certain that the right thing happened. That's very different from the institutions of the rest of the city, which I think were designed in such a way that they felt no need to be supportive.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Everyone's best interest. But I think it came from a sincere place. I'm completely sure that people went out of their way to try to make certain that the environment would be good, not just for me, but for the other people who, of course, were around. And I was hardly the only person in the AI lab, but I wasn't the only person at MIT by a long shot. On the other hand, we're what. At that point, we would have been, what, less than 20 years away from the first black PhD to graduate from MIT, right? Shirley Jackson, right? 1971, something like that? Somewhere around then. So we weren't that far away from the first first. And we were still another eight years away from the first black PhD in computer science, right? So it was a sort of interesting time. But I did not feel as if the institutions of the university were...”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I always felt empowered. Some of that was my own delusion, I think, but it worked out. So I never felt, in fact, quite the opposite. Not only did I not feel as if no one was trying to stop me, I had the distinct impression that people wanted me to succeed. My people, I meant the people in power. Not my fellow students, not that they didn't want me to succeed, but I felt supported, or at least that people were happy to see me succeed at least as much as anyone else. But, you know, 1990, you're dealing with a different set of problems, right? You're very early, at least in computer science. You're very early in the sort of Jackie Robinson period. There's this thing called the Jackie Robinson syndrome, which is that you have to, you know, the first one has to be perfect or has to be sure to succeed because of that person fails. No one else comes after for a long time. So, you know, it was kind of interesting.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “But it also felt like the most racist place I ever spent any time. You know, you couldn't go up the Orange Line at that time. I mean, again, that was 30 years ago. I don't know what it's like now. But there were places you couldn't go. And you knew it. Everybody knew it. And there were places you couldn't live. And everybody knew that. And that was just the greater Boston area in 1992.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Was just a very different experience for me. But I'd been to places where whether you were rich or whether you were poor, you could be black and rich or black and poor. And it was there and there were places and they were segregated by class as well as by race. But that existed. Here, at least when I was here, didn't feel that way at all. And it felt like a bunch of a really interesting contradiction. It felt like it was the interracial dating capital of the country. It really felt that way”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Math and Science Academy, Mays High, it was a public school. As a magnet school, that's why I was able to go there. It was the first school high school, I think, in the state of Georgia to sweep the state math and science fairs. It was great. It had 385 students, all but four of whom were black I went to school with the daughter of the former mayor of Atlanta, Michael Jackson's cousin. I mean, you know, it was an upper middle class, whatever. You know, I just dropped names occasionally. Like drop the mic, drops the names just to let you know. I used to hang out with Michael Jackson's cousin, 12th cousin nine times removed. I don't know. The point is they had money. We had a parking problem because the kids had cars. I did not come from a place where you had cars. I got my first car when I came to MIT actually.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Insofar as it existed, it was uniformly distributed throughout large parts, if not all parts, but large parts of the city. And where you had concentrations of black Bostonians, they tended to be poor. It's very different from where I grew up. I grew up on the poor side of town, sure. But then in high school, well, in ninth grade, we didn't have middle school. I went through an eighth grade school where there was a lot of, let's just say we had a riot the year that I was there. There was at least one major fight every week. It was an amazing. It was an amazing experience. But when I went to ninth grade, I went to academy. Math.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I saw a lot about the city, but at the time, I mean, I haven't been here a long time, these are the things that I remember. So, this is 1990. There is not a single... Black radio station. Now, this is 1990. I don't know if there are any radio stations anymore. I'm sure there are, but I don't listen to the radio anymore. Almost no one does. At least if you're under a certain age. But the idea is you can be in a major metropolitan area and there wasn't a single black radio station, by which I mean a radio station to play what we would call black music then was absurd, but somehow captured kind of everything about the city. I grew up in Atlanta and you've heard me tell you about Atlanta. Boston had no economically viable or socially cohesive”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I mean, that's the way I feel about it. And the black folk told me a completely different story about which part of town you did not want to be caught in after dark. And I heard all. But that was nothing new. So I decided that MIT was a great place to be as a university. And I believed it then. I believe it now. And that whatever it is I wanted to do, I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but what if I was wrong? Someone there wouldn't know how to do it. Of course, then I would pick the one topic that nobody was working on at the time, but that's okay. It was great. And so I thought that I would be fine. And I'd only be there for like four or five years. I told myself, which turned out not to be true at all, but I enjoyed my time. I enjoyed my time there. But I did see a lot of, I ran across a lot of things that were driven by what I look like while I was here. I got asked a lot of questions. I ran into a lot of cops. I did a...”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Went coffee shops, it was CD use CD places, but yeah It was that kind of a thing. Nice shops. Oh, there's all these students here. Harvard Square is beautiful. You can do all these things and you can walk in something about the outdoors, which I wasn't the slightest bit interested. Now, the outdoors is for the bugs. It's not for humans.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And ten of them loved it, and ten of them hated it. The ten who loved it were all white. The ten who hated it were all black. And they explained to me very much why that was the case. Both dads told me why it did. And the stories were remarkably the same for the two clusters. And I came up here and I could see it immediately, why people would love it and why people would not.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Got into CMU, but I had a friend who went to CMU. And so I asked him what he thought about it. He spent his time explaining to me about Pittsburgh, much less about CMU More about Pittsburgh, which I developed a strong opinion based upon his strong opinion something about the sun coming out two days out of the year. And I didn't get a chance to go there because the timing was wrong. I think it was because the timing was wrong. At MIT, I asked 20 people I knew. When I visited or I had already known for a variety of reasons whether they liked Boston.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Continued that way for, well, for the rest of my rest of my career at Georgia Tech. Of course, I found lots of other students and I met people because in Atlanta you're either black or you're white. There was nothing else. So I began to meet students of Asian descent and I met students who we would call Hispanic and so on and so forth. This is what college is supposed to do, right? It's supposed to open you up to people. And it did. But it was a very strange thing to be in the minority. When I came to Boston I will tell you a story. I applied to one place as an undergrad, Georgetown, because I was stupid. I didn't know any better. I just didn't know any better, right? No one told me. When I went to grad school, I applied to three places, Georgia Tech, because that's where I was, MIT and CMU. When I got in to MIT,”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Is different. And it's because I wasn't as far as my world was concerned. I mean, I'm six years old, five years old, first grade. The world is the seven people I see every day. So it didn't feel that way at all. And by the way, this being Atlanta, home of the civil rights movement and all the rest, it meant that when I looked at TV, which back then one did because there were only three, four, or five channels, right? And I saw the news, which my mother might make me watch, you know, the Monica Kaufman was on TV telling me the news and they were all black and the mayor was black and always been black. And so it just never occurred to me. When I went to Georgia Tech, I remember the first day walking across campus from West Campus to East Campus and realizing along the way that of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students that I was seeing, I was the only black one. That was enlightening and very often putting because that occurred to me. And then, of course, it”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I wish I'm doing puberty when I wrote lots and lots of poetry. Anyway, so I was aware of it. I didn't think too much about it, but I was aware of it. But I was surrounded. It wasn't that I wasn't aware of race. It's that I wasn't aware that I was a minority.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Between the two. Parents know about this? Yes, but being a girlfriend and boyfriend in first grade just basically meant that you spent slightly more time together during recesses. It had no, I think we Eskimo kissed once. It didn't mean anything. At the time, it felt very scandalous because everyone was watching. I was like, ah, my life is now my life has changed in first grade. No one told me elementary school would be like this.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Girlfriend, I say I had a girlfriend. I didn't have a girlfriend. I wasn't even entirely sure what girls were. The first grade, but I do remember she decided that was her girlfriend's white girl named Heather. And we had a long discussion about how it was okay for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, despite the fact that she was whitening and that I was black.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So let's back up to this. So, as you said, I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My earliest memories arriving in Atlanta in a moving truck at the age of three and a half, so I think of myself as being from Atlanta. I'm a very distinct memory of that. So I grew up in Atlanta. It's the only place I ever knew as a kid. I loved it. Like much of the country and certainly much of Atlanta in the 70s and 80s, it was deeply highly segregated, though not in a way that I think was obvious to you unless you were looking at it or were old enough to have noticed it, but you could divide up Atlanta and Atlanta is hardly unique in this way by highway and you could get race in class that way. So I grew up not only in a predominantly black area, to say the very least, I grew up on the poor side of that. But I was very much aware of race for a bunch of reasons. One, that people made certain that I was. My family did, but also that it would come up. So in first grade, I had...”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Didn't do any of that. In fact, I literally went to IBM for three months, got in a car, and drove straight to Boston with my mother. Or Cambridge Moved into an apartment I had never seen over the Royal East. Anyway, that's another story. So let me tell you a little bit about”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And I went directly to grad school from undergrad. So I had no distractions in between my bachelor's and my master's in PhD”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Everyone to think that way. Because at the end, it would not only make them better at whatever it is that they are doing. Emphasize doing. It'll also make them better citizens. It'll help them to understand what others are doing to them so that they can react accordingly. Because you're not going to solve the problem of social media insofar as you think of social media as a problem. Just making slightly better code, right? It only works if people react to it appropriately and know what's happening and therefore take control over what they're doing. I mean, that's my take on it.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “We're making decisions based upon a set of parameters that we made up. And if we did slightly different parameters, we'd have completely different outcomes. And so the lesson of computing, computer science education, is to be able to think like that and to be aware of it when you're doing it. Basically, at the end of the day, it's a way of surfacing your assumptions. I mean, we call them parameters or we call them if-then statements or whatever, but you're forced to surface those assumptions. That's the key thing that you should get out of a computing education, that and that the models and languages and the machines are equivalent. But it actually follows from that that you have to be explicit about what it is you're trying to do because the model you're building is something you will one day run. So you better get it right or at least understand it and be able to express roughly what you want to express. So I think it is key that we figure out how to educate everyone.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Things is quite important, and that's somewhat different from coding. Coding is a crude means to an end. On the other hand, the idea of coding, what that means, that it's a programming language and it has these sort of things that you fiddle with and these ways that you express, that is an incredibly important point. In fact, I would argue that one of the big holes in machine learning right now and in AI is that we forget that we are basically doing software engineering. We forget that we are doing we are using programming like we're using languages to express what we're doing. We get just so all caught up in the deep network or we get all caught up in whatever that we forget that you know”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Somewhat different. Everyone doesn't have to learn how to code, but everyone needs to learn how to think in the way that you can be precise. And I mean precise in the sense of repeatable, not just, you know, in the sense of not resolution in the sense of get the right number of bits. In saying what it is you want the machine to do and being able to describe a problem in such a way that it is executable, which we are not, human beings are not very good at that. In fact, I think we spend much of our time talking back and forth just to kind of vaguely understand what the other person means and hope we get a good enough that we can act accordingly. You can't do that with machines, at least not yet. And so having to think that precisely.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Girlfriends. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, history is being lost anyway, but the big lessons of history shouldn't be. And I think to take it to the question of computing and sort of education, the point is you have to get across those lessons. You have to get across the way of thinking. And you have to be able to go back and, you know, you don't want to lose the data even if you don't necessarily have the information at your fingertips. With computing, I think it's...”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Right. And, you know, we've already lost lots of history. And of course, you have your own history, that some of which will be, it's even lost to you, right? You don't even remember whatever it was you were doing 17 years ago.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “A lot there, I will say that, well, first off, it would be an absolute shame if no one studied history. On the other hand, it's T approaches infinity, the amount of history is presumably also growing at least linearly. And so you have to forget more and more of history. But history needs to always be there. I mean, I can imagine a world where, you know, if you think of your brains as being outside of your head, that you can kind of learn the history you need to know when you need to know it, that seems fanciful. But it's a kind of way of is there a sufficient statistic of history? No. And there's certainly, but there may be for the particular thing you have to care about, but, you know, those who do not remember.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And we're a service unit because people need to know the things we need to know. And our job, much as the mathematician's job is to help, you know, this person over here to think like a mathematician much the way of you taking chemistry as a freshman is not to learn chemistry. It's to learn to think like a scientist, right? Our job is to help them to think like a computationalist. And we have to take both of those things very seriously. And I'm not sure that as a field, we have historically certainly taken the second thing that our job is to help them to think a certain way. People who aren't going to be our main job. I don't think we've taken that very seriously at all.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “In and of itself. The thing about computing, and this is not unique to computing, though at this point in time it is distinctive about computing where we happen to be in 2020, is we are both a thriving major. In fact, the thriving major almost every place.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “It's so funny you say this. I wouldn't say it's going to metastasize, but there's kind of two ways that fields destroy themselves. One is they become super narrow. And I think we can think of fields that might be that way. They become pure. And we have that instinct. We have that impulse. I'm sure you can think of several people who want computer science to be this pure thing. The other way is you become everywhere and you become everything and nothing. And so everyone says, you know, I'm going to teach Fortran for engineers or whatever. I'm going to do this. And then you lose the thing that makes it worth studying.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “It's not a worry. You shouldn't worry about that at all. Computing is computer science computing. It's not central, but it's not the most important thing in the world. It's not more important. It is just key to helping others do other cool things they're going to do. You're not going to be a historian in 2030. You're not going to get your PhD in history without understanding some data science and computing because the way you're going to get history done in part, and I say done, the way you're going to get it done is you're going to look at data and you're going to have a system that's going to help you to analyze things to help you to think about a better way to describe history and to understand what's going on and what it tells us about where we might be going. The same is true for psychology, same true for all of these things. The reason I brought that up is because the philosopher has a lot to say about computing. The psychologist has a lot to say about the way humans interact with computing, right? And certainly a lot about intelligence, which for me, ultimately, is kind of the goal of building these computational devices is to build something intelligent.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Absolutely. And by the way, it works both ways. So let's take biology for a moment. It turns out a cell is basically a bunch of if-then statements. If you look at it the right way, which is nice because I understand if-then statements, I never really enjoyed biology. But I do understand if then statements. And if you tell the biologists that and they begin to understand that, it actually helps them to think about a bunch of really cool things. There'll still be biology involved, but whatever. On the other hand, the fact of biology is, in fact, a bunch of, the cell is a bunch of if-then statements or whatever, allows the computationalists to think differently about the language and the way that we, well, certainly the way we would do AI and machine learning, but it's just even the way that we think about computation. So the important thing to me is, as my engineering colleagues who are not in computer science worry about computer science eating up engineering to colleges where computer science is trapped.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Convey that while conveying the tools and the skills that you need in order to succeed, then it is a big win. That's what I think you have to do.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It only matters because there's a person inside the triangle that what's changed about computing, computer science, whatever you want to call it, is we now have so much data and so much computational power. We're able to do really, really interesting, promising things. But the interesting and the promising kind of only matters with respect to human beings and their relationship to it. So the triangle exists. That is fundamentally computing. What makes it worthwhile and interesting and potentially world species changing is that there are human beings inside of it and intelligence that has to interact with it that changes the data, the information that makes sense and gives meaning to the models of languages and the machines. So if the curriculum can”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “My life has changed and my thinking about this in the 10 or 15 years it's been since I tried to put that to paper with some colleagues is the realization, which comes to a question you actually asked me earlier, which has to do with trees falling down and whether it matters, is this sort of triangle of equality.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Truths in the world. Information is a scientific thing to discover, right? Not just a mathematical conceit that gets created. But of course it's engineering because you're actually dealing with constraints in the world and trying to execute machines that actually run. But it's also a math because you're actually worrying about these languages that describes what happening. But the fact that regular expressions and finite state automata, one of which feels like a machine, or at least an abstraction machine, the other is the language that they're actually the equivalent. I mean, that is not a small thing. And it permeates everything that we do, even when we're just trying to figure out how to do debugging. So that idea, I think, is fundamental. And we would do better if we made that more explicit.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “From others is that he or she understands that models, languages, and machines are equivalent. They are the same thing. And because it's not just a model, but it's a machine that is an executable thing that can be described as a language, that means that it's dynamic. So it is mathematical in some sense in the kind of sense of abstraction, but it is fundamentally dynamic and executable. And the mathematician is not necessarily worried about either the dynamic part. In fact, whenever I tried to write something for mathematicians, they invariably demand that I make it static. And that's not a bad thing. It's just, it's a way of viewing the world, that truth is a thing, right? It's not a process that continually runs, right? So that dynamic thing matters, that self-reflection of the system itself matters. And that is what computing, that is what computing brought us. So it is a science because it, the models fundamentally”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You know, building demonstrably superior technology with respect to some notion of trade-offs, whatever that means, right? That's sort of the world that you live in. What is computing? How is computing different? So I've thought about this for a long time and I've come View about what computing actually is, what the mindset is. And it's a little abstract, but that would be appropriate for computing. I think that what distinguishes the computationalist.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “People often think about tools and tool sets, and when you're really trying to be good, you think about skills and skill sets. But disciplines are about mindsets, right? They're about fundamental ways of thinking, not just the hammer that you pick up, whatever that is, to hit the nail, not just the skill of learning how to hammer well or whatever. It's the mindset of what's the fundamental way to think about the world, right? And disciplines, different disciplines give you different mindsets. They give you different ways of sort of thinking through. So with that in mind, I think that computing, to even ask the question whether it's a discipline, is you have to decide, does it have a mindset? Does it have a way of thinking about the world that is different from the scientist who is doing discovery and using the scientific method as a way of doing it or the mathematician who builds abstractions and tries to find sort of steady state truth about the abstractions that may be artificial, but whatever. Or is it the engineer who's all about”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “So I think the curriculum is where I like to play. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this. But I will tell you, I'll answer your question by answering a slightly different question first and getting back to this, which is, you know, you talked about disciplines and what does it mean to be a discipline? The truth is what we really educate people in from the beginning, but certainly through college, you sort of failed if you don't think about it this way, I think, is the world”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So, I don't know about a perfect curriculum, although that's an important question because at the end of the day, without the curriculum, you don't get anywhere. Curriculum to me is the fundamental data structure. It's not even the classroom. I love it.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I do not reject Disco. I appreciate all the mistakes that we have made to get. Actually, some of the disco is actually really, really good.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “That's definitely a scent. I mean, it's all, I mean, it's all aligned. I mean, it's all. All a line that carries it all together. You know, I guess I would answer your question that I'm thinking about it in 2020 or I'm thinking about it in 1960. I'd probably give a different answer. I'm just thinking in terms of that was rock. But when you look back on it, it was funky. We didn't use those words, or maybe we did. I wasn't around, but I don't think we use the word 1960. Funk, certainly not the way we used it in the 70s and the 80s.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Go look up Hoodoo Man Blues, Junior Wells, and just listen to Snatch It Back and Hold Hold it. And you'll see it. And they were contemporaries.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Some underground hip hop song, and I am made happy and whole again. So I know it's out there. I don't listen to as much as I used to because I'm listening to podcasts and old music from the 1980s. It's a kind of no beat at all, but you know, there's a little bit of sampling here and there, I'm sure.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Always been a fan of the lyrics. In fact, if you go back and you read my reviews, which I recently was rereading, man, I wrote my last review the month I graduated. I got my PhD, which says something about something. I'm not sure what though. I didn't always, but I often would start with it's all about the lyrics. For me, it's all, it's about the lyrics. Someone has already written in the comments before I've even finished having this conversation that neither of us knows what we're talking about. And it's all in the underground hip-hop. And here's who you should go listen to. And that is true. Every time I despair for popular rap, someone points me to or I discover.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “But still, it's the right attitude that, you know, and what else is jazz, right? Jazz is about putting pieces together and then putting your own spin on, right? It's all the same. It's all the same thing. It's all the same thing.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “It's pieces. You're putting pieces together, you're putting pieces of music together to create new music, right? Now, that doesn't mean that the root, I mean, the roots are doing their own thing.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “It's being sampled by someone who Referring to something they remembered when they were young, perhaps from somewhere else altogether. And you just didn't realize what it was because it wasn't a popular song where you happened to grow up. So this stuff's been going on for a long time. It's one of the things that I think is beautiful. Run DMC, Jamaster J used to play piano. He would record himself playing piano and then sample that to make it a part of what was going on rather than play the piano.”

    2020-11-02 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source