YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Nielsen

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-04-07
most recent: 2026-04-07
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

“Some revamped learning system. I'll be really curious if you, I mean, it's also true, right? Tiny incremental improvements in this, I mean, they're just worth so much.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some things where it's sort of a Ribb Goldberg machine, you can just sort of learn about all the bits and it feels kind of entertaining. But if you step back and think about the question, what am I actually doing here? It might not actually be meeting your objectives. Maybe you want to become a sysadmin and learning Linux is a great use of your time. No harm in that at all. But if your answer is, if your objective is to understand the fundamentals of computing, it's much less clear that that's a good use of your time. I thought that was certainly an answer I've thought a lot about where you actually need to, for a certain type of mind, there is a seductiveness in just learning systems and confusing that with understanding.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't have anything to do with computer science. It's just a great big ball of mud. There's a few interesting ideas in there which are worth understanding, but mostly all you're learning is stuff about Linux. Like you're not actually learning anything which is transferable. I thought there was that there's a certain kind of seductiveness”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's somewhat valuable. That's part of the seductiveness, of course. Like it's not actually useless. But yeah, it can sort of substitute for actually doing this. Interesting that, like, the extent to which to what extent should you be outsourcing that kind of stuff and to what extent it's really, there's some sort of interesting judgment call about... There is a whole bunch of routine work that you want done. And in fact, it's low value for you. So you may as well get, if you can get a chatbot to do it, you may as well. So somebody interviewed the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay years ago and he was asked what he thought about basically Linux. And if I remember his answer correctly, he basically said, look, you know.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I don't think the interview is that high stakes, right? You're not writing a book about special relativity, and you're not trying to write a book that replaces the current, whatever the existing standard textbook is. That's a really high thing. A phrase that I sort of... Find particularly difficult and it's a funny one. People will talk about going deep on a subject. And it turns out different people have different ideas of what this means. Some people means they read a couple of blog posts. Some people it means they read a book about it. Some people it means they wrote a book about it. And I think what your standard is, sort of the standard you hold yourself to determines a lot about your ability to integrate knowledge in this way.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, by far the most common things there's always some creative artifact. Sometimes it's a class, sometimes it's engagement with a group of people who there's some collective creative artifact that you're working on together. I mean, you might not even be aware of it, but you're acting as an input to their creative ends in some way. And sometimes it's just an essay or a book or whatever. It's one of the reasons why I often quite enjoy doing podcasts. I mean, particularly, I mean, I said yes to come here passionately because I know you ask unusually demanding questions. And so it's sort of that's an attempt to get this sort of perspective from a different, it's a different kind of forcing function. So, you're trying to pick sort of the most demanding creative context.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe even the most important part of the whole process. But that very hard oneness of it means that I internalize it afterwards. I often find actually, if I... I've written sometimes 10,000 word essays in a couple of days and I've written them in three months or six months. I feel like I didn't learn very much from the ones that only took a couple of days. Whereas some of the ones that took three months, I'll be 15 years later, I'll still remember.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe. There's something about, I mean, what problem are you solving for each episode? And I mean, as far as I can tell, that's the only way I really understand anything is that I get interested in something. At first, I don't even have a problem, but there's just some sense that there's some contribution to make here. And gradually you home in and there's a problem. And then, funnily enough, I mean, spending time stuck is incredibly important. And I sort of, you know, that used to just be annoying. Now it seems like, oh, this is actually...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Episodes. Exactly. Ada Palmer. What wonderful to talk to, incredibly interesting, but for you personally, like what changed? Right.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, lots of people think. There's this terrible idea. People that they should be in flow all of the time. And of course, as far as I can tell, like high performers just don't believe this at all. They're in flow some of the time. You certainly see this with athletes. When they're actually out there playing basketball or tennis or whatever, ideally they are in flow much of the time. But when they're training, they're not. They're stuck a lot of the time or they're doing things badly. And I suppose I wonder what that looks like for you.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of invariably. Like they've tried, but they haven't really tried. I think that's a very familiar feeling for all of us. Often you could do a lot more if you had just the right sort of demanding taskmaster standing by you and saying, look, you're barely operating here. And so I do sort of wonder a little bit about what's the demanding taskmaster? What can they ask you? It's going to make your preparation way more intense.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's sort of an incredibly complicated and rich question. I mean, it does seem like the question is, how do you make it a higher growth context? How do you make it a more demanding context? And sort of, you know, you can do that in relatively small ways, but that might, however, yield compounding returns, or you can do something that is maybe more radical. Maybe it means actually starting sort of a parallel project in which you do something that is actually quite a bit different. There is something I think really interesting about how being very demanding can simply change your response to something something that I would sometimes do with students and sometimes with myself is really aid more at myself was they would say some week oh you know I'm gonna try and do you know this work over the coming week and then the next week would come by and they hadn't solved the problem or whatever you sort of like you know if a million dollars had been at stake like would you have put the same effort in and the answer is no”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who just missed Absolutely, I've known people who won gold medals at IMOs and things like that who then tried to become mathematicians and failed. Like what happened? What was the reason? I suspect in many cases that's actually more informative.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, then there's counter examples. Girdle publishing almost nothing. But broadly speaking, I think you need a very good reason to be avoiding it. basically to not do that. It's funny, I mean, I've talked to, I've met a lot of people over the years who you talk to, they're clearly brilliant and they're just obsessed that they are going to work on the great project that makes them famous and they never do anything. And that seems connected, like it's a type of aversiveness, I think, very often they just don't want public judgment. Something that I would love to see, there's an awful lot of biographies and memoirs and histories of people who achieve a lot. I wish there was like a very large number of biographies of people who are fantastically talented.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As just a reminder to that there are real benefits to not being efficient. But it's not an answer to your question. I mean, really, I think all I'm saying is I struggle a lot with the question.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's he doing? Yeah, I mean, maybe the answer is just he's smarter than the rest of us. And there's a lot of luck as well But certainly for myself, anyway, trying to identify those things that are routine that I should get good at, and then just try and do as quickly as possible. I think that's yielded a certain amount of returns, but also being willing to bet a little bit more on myself, on sort of the variance side has also been very, very, very helpful. That's really hard. Intrinsically, you're putting yourself in situations where you don't know what the outcome is going to be. And so if you're very driven to be productive and whatever, and actually mostly it's not working over there, you're like, let's reduce this. Like, it doesn't feel right. When I worked in San Francisco, actually I practiced I used to have each day was instead of taking the 15-minute walk to work, I would take the more beautiful 30-minute walk to work, partially just because it was beautiful, but partially also.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he was certainly very active. There's also two types of work that tends to be involved in any kind of creative project. There's routine staff. And there you just want to avoid procrastination. You just want to like, you know, how do I get good at this or how do I outsource it? And how do I do it as rapidly as possible and just avoid getting into a situation where you're prolonging it? And then this high variance stuff where you actually you need to be willing to take a lot of time. You need to be willing to go to the different places and talk to the different people where in any given instance most of it's just not going to be an input. And somehow sort of balancing those two things, I think a lot of people are very good at doing one or the other, but it's hard to, you know, it's almost like a personality trait sort of.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, it's something I stress about a lot. Sometimes I feel like I'm too slow. Actually, it's funny. I mean, the Darwin example is really interesting. Prolific at what God knows how many letters he wrote. It must have been an enormous...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To solve some of these inverse problems, and you would know nothing about, or you would know very little about quantum field theory, you would know very little about detective physics, you would know very little about vacuum physics, all these other things that are absolutely, or very little about data processing, very little about all these things that are absolutely essential to understanding the Higgs boson. And I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas, but they don't understand sort of everything in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these papers with well over a thousand authors. And those people can talk to one another at a high level, but they don't understand each other's specialties all that much depth. I mean, things like, as I say, detective physics, vacuum physics, these kinds of solving of inverse problems.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inside these accelerators, you have these cascades, so a particle will be massively accelerated, maybe it'll be collided, and then you'll get a shower of particles which decays and decays and decays, and there's just this incredible sort of consequential shower, which is ultimately what you see at the detector. And then you have to retroactively figure out what produced it. And so there's these very, very complicated sort of inverse problems that need to be solved. You've got this final data, but you need to figure out what produced it, and that's how you look for sort of signatures of these. And what many of these people were was they were incredibly deep experts on simulation methods for sort of following particle tracks. And this was really deep and difficult stuff. And I'm like, wow, you could spend a lifetime just learning sort of how to do this and how”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm not sure I have a well ordering of them to give you a best, but an example that I think is very interesting is the LHC, where it's just this immensely complicated object. I actually, years ago, I snuck into an accelerator physics conference. I didn't know anything at all about accelerator physics, but I was just kind of curious to see what they were talking about. And this particular group of people were experts on numerical methods, in particular on inverse methods. And so it basically turns out.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physics is so much more competitive than biology that we need to establish our priority by uploading as rapidly as possible to the preprint archive. We can't possibly wait to do it with the journals. And I think this emphasizes the extent to which this kind of attribution economy is just something we construct. It's just something which we do by sort of agreement. And so any attempt to sort of change that economy results then in a different system by which we construct knowledge. And so there is sort of this very fundamental set of problems around the political economy of science. We've got this collective project and how we mediated depends upon the economy we have around ideas.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main positive outcomes of work on open science. I'll give you a really practical sort of example to illustrate the problem. For a long time in physics, there was a preprint culture in which people would upload preprints to the preprint archive. And in biology, this didn't happen. There was no preprint culture. That's changing now, but for a long time this was the case. And I used to sort of amuse myself by asking physicists and biologists why this was the case. And what I would hear sometimes from biologists was they would say, well, biology is so much more competitive than physics that we need to protect our priority and so we can't possibly upload to the archive. We have to just publish in journals. And then I would sometimes hear from physicists.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's then an expectation of attribution. And so there's a kind of reputation economy which gets built. And so basically, oh, such and such did this work, so they deserve the credit for that. And that's then the basis for their careers. So this is sort of the underlying political economy of science. And that made a lot of sense when what you've got is a printing press and the ability to do scientific journals. Then you transition to this modern situation where in fact you can start to share a lot more, you can start to share your code, you can start to share your data. You can start to share in-progress ideas. But there's no direct credit associated to those. It's not at all obvious how much reputation should be associated to them. That's all constructed socially. And so making it a live issue is, I think, a very important thing to have done. And that's, I view anyway, is one of the...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of an issue to be considering in the whole political economy of science. If you go back, say, three centuries, there was a very similar kind of an argument prosecuted, which is the question, do we publicly disclose our scientific results or not? So if you look at people like Galileo and Kepler and so on, the extent to which they publicly disclosed, like it was done in a very odd kind of a way. They sometimes did bizarre things where famously they published some of their results as anagrams. So basically they'd find some discovery, they would write down the result in sort of a sentence like the discovery of the, I'm trying to think of an example, I think the moons of Mars, I think was one such example. I'm getting it wrong. Was it Hook's law? Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point was they'd write it down, but then they'd scramble it.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a distillation of a set of ideas which you might be able to contest. But if you can get people actually sort of thinking about it and engaged with that kind of argument, that's a very fundamental.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, this set of ideas about open science, I mean, it's interesting. You didn't stop and define open science there, which I think 20 years ago you would have had to do. People recognized the phrase. People have some set of associations with it. Most often they have a relatively simple set of associations. It means maybe something about making scientific papers open access. Very often they have some set of notions about maybe it means also making code openly available. Maybe it means making data openly available. But already very large successes of the open science movement, which is to make those salient issues, those issues on which people have opinions, and then there are relatively common arguments, an argument like, so this is sort of the meme version, you know, publicly funded science should be open science.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so to some extent, you're sort of saying, okay, I wanted to get into this game of contributing to humanity's sort of... Understanding of the universe, and you are applying sort of this low-hanging fruit algorithm. You're like, relative to my particular set of interests and abilities, where should I pick up my shovel and start digging? And there it was like, oh, this looks like quite a good place to. To start digging, and different people, of course, chose very differently. It was a very unusual choice at the time. This was 1992. Very few people were thinking about that.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simulate quantum field theory effectively. And that kind of question is, I think, very interesting and very exciting there. It's obviously a fundamental question about the universe. Here's some wonderful ideas in there about quantum algorithms and where they come from and what they mean and what they relate to the meaning of the wave function and questions like this, which is still not agreed upon amongst physicists. So yeah, there's just some sense of, oh, I am in contact with something which is, A, deeply important, and B, we as a civilization don't have this. And so, of course, you start to focus your attention a little bit there.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Benefiting from the taste of this other person. But as soon as I read the papers or take a look at the papers, these are exciting papers. They're asking very fundamental questions and you're sort of like, oh, I can make progress here. These are things that one could potentially work on. Deutsch has this sort of conjecture that basically there should be, or I don't know what the right term for it is, thesis or what you would call it, that a universal model quantum Turing machine should be capable of efficiently simulating any system, any physical system at all. This is a very provocative idea. I think in that paper he more or less claims that he's proved it. I'm not sure that necessarily everybody would agree with that. There's questions about whether or not you can say...”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of matured around sort of let's say 1980 or so. And somebody like von Diamond could have had the idea earlier, but it is, I think, quite an interesting. In fact, a story about Richard Feynman, he went and got one of the first PCs, which was around 1980, 1981. And he was apparently just so excited with this device. He actually tripped and hurt himself quite badly, sort of carrying his brand new computing device. That's a very historically contingent sort of a coincidence, but having somebody who's very, very talented and understanding of quantum mechanics also just very excited about these new machines. It's not so surprising perhaps that he's thinking then. What similar story could you have told 10 years earlier? Like there is just no the conditions don't exist for it. So I think that's, I mean, it's quite a banal story.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, well, you should ask David. You can't ask Feynman, unfortunately, but he'll know much better than I do. A couple things that I think are interesting. One is that, of course, computation became far more salient sort of late 70s, early 80s. It just became a thing which many more people were interested in, partially for very banal reasons. You could go and buy a PC, you could buy an Apple II, you could buy a Commodore 64, you could buy all these kinds of things, became apparent to people that these were very powerful devices, very interesting to think about. At the same time, the quantum case, that was also the time of the ball trap and the ability to trap single ions and so on. And up to that point, we hadn't really had the ability to manipulate single quantum states. So you kind of got these two separate things that just for historically contingent reasons had both”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, let's just focus on sort of the question about what actually changed. So why was quantum computing not a thing in the 1950s? It could have been. Somebody like, I don't know, John von Neumann, good example, absolutely pioneering computation, also wrote a very important book about quantum mechanics and was deeply interested in quantum mechanics. He could have invented quantum computing at that time. And I think there were quite a number of people who potentially could have. So why do we have these papers by people like Feynman and Deutsch in the 80s? I think fairly regarded as the foundation of the field. There are some partial anticipations a little bit earlier, but they were nowhere near as comprehensive and nowhere near as deep.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we've only been thinking about it for 30 years, or whatever. It's 40 or so years, not for very long, and we sort of haven't in some sense thought that hard about it as a civilization. So does it turn out that it's very narrow? Maybe. Does it turn out that it's very broad? That's also like a really radical expansion. That seems distinctly possible. Keep in mind as well, we've been doing it without the benefit of having the devices to have.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using classical computers, but actually there'll be an interesting transition with quantum computers as well. They're probably capable of a strictly larger class of potentially interesting computations. So maybe actually the character of AQGI or whatever it should be called is actually qualitatively different. So maybe there's sort of a brief period between those two things. Interesting. I mean, as I say, this is just speculation, but it's certainly amusing.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that seems, I mean, obviously we can't prove this, but it certainly seems quite plausible. I mean, part of the issue, of course, is just the substrate we have available to conceive seems all wrong. You can't speculate with a bunch of chimpanzees about what it would be like to have language, just to sort of pick a major transition in the past. The transition itself is the thing. And it seems likely if we're talking about taking a puff kind of thoughts, I'm certainly amused by the idea that there's going to be some transition involving artificial general intelligence.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is an example of a highly automated, very sophisticated system with electronically mediated sensors and actuators where machine learning, in fact, is being used to process the data. So in that sense, we're already starting to sort of see that transition. We've been seeing it for decades.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're not changing it, if there's some kind of stagnation there, if you're not changing those external sort of circumstances, yes, you may start to get sort of diminishing returns again. But that doesn't mean there's anything intrinsic about the situation. Maybe something just external needs to change again. Obviously, a lot of people think AI is potentially going to be a driver. I mean, it certainly will at some level, in fact, to the extent you can think of a lot of modern scientific instrumentation as really, I mean, at some level, kind of... Robots, what is the James Webb Space Telescope? Well, it's unconventional maybe to describe it as a robot, but it's not completely unreasonable either.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were some very good ideas that we just didn't have. Even once you've had the ideas, then you need to build institutions around them. You actually need to solve a whole lot of different problems about training, about allocation of capital, about all these kinds of things, even just about basic sort of security for researchers so they're not worried about the inquisition or things like that. So there's all these kind of complicated problems. You solve all those complicated problems and then all of a sudden boom, there's a massive sort of burst of scientific progress.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that intrinsic? Is that something about the structure of the world? What is it? Well, one thing which hasn't changed that much is sort of the individual minds which are doing this kind of work. And maybe those should be sort of being improved as well or some sort of feedback process going on there. And maybe that changes the nature of things. I suppose I look at scientific progress up until let's say 1700, something like that. And it was very slow and also it was very irregular. You had the Ionians back sort of five centuries before Christ doing these quite remarkable things. And in so much knowledge would get lost and then it would be rediscovered and then it would be lost again. And you'd have to say that progress was very slow. And there it's partially just bound up with the fact that”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, first of all, all of their examples are narrow, right? They pick a particular thing and then they look at some particular metric. Nowhere in that shows up, like GPUs don't show up there, right? Like in the sense of, oh, all of a sudden you get this ability to parallelize. And that's really interesting. So this sort of a lot of external consequences that are just alighted from basically they have these simple quantitative measures, they look at it in agricultural productivity, they look at it in a whole lot of different ways. But you do have to focus narrowly. And I suppose I'm certainly interested, as I say, in this fact that just new types of progress keep becoming possible. There is still, I think, even there, there does seem to be some phenomenon of diminishing returns.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so just this fact that you keep finding what seemed like deep new fundamental primitives, I find very, for me that has been a very important intuition bump. And it's across, I mean, given that particular example, but I think you see that same pattern in a lot of different areas.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All I have here is speculation and sort of instinct. My instinct is we keep finding very fundamental new things. It was very, I mean, for me anyway, quite formative to understand, as I say, I gave the example before, there's this wonderful ideas of church and Turing and these other people, ideas about universal programmable devices, and then you understand later, oh, this also contains within it the ideas of public key cryptography. And then you understand later, oh, that also contains within it the ideas, I mean, people refer to it as cryptocurrency or whatever, but there's a very deep set of ideas there about the ability to collectively maintain an agreed-upon ledger, which is built upon this. And there's probably many deep ideas to sort of, they actually took whatever, it's taken many years really to figure out the right canonical form of those.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and whether or not that's the future of manufacturing is something very simple, sort of where everything goes as throughputs through, I don't know, maybe it's a bioreactor or something like that. So you send the information and then you grow stuff or you have some 3D printer that actually works. And if they're good enough, then actually it does become much more a pure information problem. And some of this process knowledge becomes much less important.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the question about sort of to what extent our fabrication get sort of very uniform and get really commoditized. 3D printers have been the next big thing for at least 20 years now. Why do they still not work all that well? Why are they still not actually at the center of manufacturing? And sort of what comes after that? It is funny to look at, say, the ribosome by contrast. It really is at the center of biology and a whole lot of really interesting ways.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that starts to look like a set of institutions where we are actually influencing sort of how we explore the tech tree.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something I really dislike about technological determinist arguments. I'm willing to buy it low enough down when progress is relatively simple. But higher up, you start to get to shape the way in which you do the exploration. And it's interesting, you know, people, we are starting to shape it in interesting ways. There's various technologies that have been essentially banned. Think about DDT, you think about chlorofluorocarbons, you think about restrictions on the use of nuclear weapons, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, those kinds of things are, you know, they're not, they weren't done before the fact, but they're starting to get pretty close in some cases where we just sort of preemptively decide we're not going to go down that path.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think it's interesting just the sheer fact that. My expectation and my intuition obviously differs a great deal from yours on this, is that most parts of the tech tree are never going to be explored. There's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be discovered. And not only we, but nobody ever is going to discover most of them. So choices about how to make, how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a special limited model. Chimpanzees can do interesting things. We don't trade with them. And I think it's sort of interesting to think about the reasons why. And part of it is just power, I think. Like once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate. And maybe there's something special about human beings, but maybe it's also sort of a more general sort of a thing. They're no longer, they give up, you know, you need all these special things to be true before groups will trade. And it's not necessarily obvious.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I hadn't thought about that at all. That is a very interesting observation. It is funny. I mean, comparative advantage is something that people, you know, they love to invoke and it's a very beautiful idea, obviously. There are limits to it.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source